Japan’s innovation problem

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…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

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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

Dispute over police actions compounds traffic tragedy

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Long detentions and interrogations are common in Japan — whatever the nationality. “This is surely one of the very few democratic countries where the police can detain someone for four months after a traffic accident,” says Lawrence Repeta of Omiya Law School. Repeta says such detentions reflect the unequal standing in Japan between defense lawyers and prosecutors. “The practice is truly pre-modern.” 

http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/fl20070206zg.html

Japan strips shelves of books on ‘foreigner crime’

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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.

http://www.khaleejtimes.com/DisplayArticleNew.asp?xfile=data/theworld/2007/February/theworld_February146.xml&section=theworld&col

One-third of major firms have workers who do at least 100 hours overtime a month

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One-third of major firms in Japan employ workers who are putting in 100 hours or more of overtime work a month, a survey by the Central Labor Relations Commission has found.

The survey, which comes as the government is pushing for the introduction of a “white-collar exemption” system to exempt salaried workers from regular working hours and abolish overtime pay, puts the spotlight on long working hours at Japanese companies.

The commission conducts surveys on wages every year. Every other year, it conducts surveys on the amount of time employees spend working. The latest survey, conducted in 2006, is the first to ask companies if any of their employees are doing 100 hours or more of overtime work each month.

Questioned in the survey were 373 firms employing 1,000 or more workers and having capital of at least 500 million yen. Responses were received from 247 firms.

The results showed that as of June 2006, a total of 33.2 percent of firms employed at least one worker who put in 100 hours or more of overtime each month. The average amount of time each worker put in a year, excluding overtime, stood at 1,881 hours, 54 minutes — a figure that remained practically unchanged compared with the previous survey.

The average wage revision resulting from regular wage hikes and raises reached 6,275 yen, an increase of 280 yen compared with the previous year. The average monthly wage fell 1,500 yen compared with the previous survey to 377,300 yen. However, monthly overtime pay rose 6,300 yen to hit 69,500 yen.

Workers who do 80 hours or more of overtime a month are considered to be at risk of dying from overwork. A standard for paying workers’ compensation due to death from overwork is acknowledging that the worker has performed 100 hours or more of overtime in the month immediately prior to his or her death. Performing 80 hours or more over overtime a month is accepted as a standard for diagnosing depression caused by excessive work.

http://mdn.mainichi-msn.co.jp/national/news/20070205p2a00m0na012000c.html

Seizures rising over unpaid health insurance premiums

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Municipal governments increasingly are seizing assets of individuals who are behind in their national health insurance premium payments, an Asahi Shimbun survey shows.

The survey showed such asset seizures rose an average 1.7-fold from fiscal 2001 to 2005 in the nation’s 15 largest cities and Tokyo’s 23 wards.

National health insurance programs cover self-employed people, farmers, job-hopping “freeters,” retirees and the unemployed. They are administered by municipal governments.

Health insurance programs are in the red in 64 percent of municipalities nationwide.

Legal action taken against delinquents, including seizures of bank accounts and properties, has risen as the collection ratio has fallen.

The collection rate has dropped to close to 90 percent nationwide on average and is hovering below 90 percent in large cities.

Health ministry statistics also showed that seizures of assets from nonpayers rose from 44,112 cases worth 15.6 billion yen in fiscal 2001 to 68,488 cases worth 24.5 billion yen in fiscal 2004.

Municipalities resorting to assets seizures jumped from 39 percent nationwide to 55 percent in the same period.

But some local entities remain cautious about taking such forcible steps because national health insurance typically covers more low-income earners than other programs, such as for salaried workers.

The ratio of self-employed people and those working in farming, forestry and fisheries fell to 21 percent of those in the insurance program in fiscal 2004, from about 70 percent 40 years earlier.

In contrast, the ratio of unemployed people jumped from less than 10 percent to 52 percent over the same period.

http://www.asahi.com/english/Herald-asahi/TKY200702050125.html

Magazine plays to Japanese xenophobia

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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

Racist Comic Book on Convenience Store Shelves

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Here?s a … publication, apparently available at convenience stores, courtesy of friend Steve (who took the trouble to purchase, scan, and help publicize this issue). Entitled ?GAIJIN [sic] HANZAI URA FILE?, it publicizes all the underground evils that gaijin in Japan [supposedly] do…

Here are some ?highlights?:
Back Page:
??????????????47000?!!
47,000 crimes by foreigners each year!!
There then follows a ?danger rating? (???) of each country, scattered on a world map surrounded by knives, guns and syringes:
China: 14
Russia: 5
Korea: 9
Brazil: 8
Colombia: 3
Etc.
None for the USA, Canada, Australia or the whole of Europe?

http://www.debito.org/index.php/?p=192

Number of non-regular workers up nearly 1 million

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The number of non-regular workers with employment contracts of up to one year increased by 995,000, or 14.8%, in 2005 from 2000, a government report showed Wednesday, underscoring that companies are refraining from employing regular workers to cut labor costs.

The number of non-regular employees totaled 7,716,000 in 2005 while that of regular workers with contracts of more than one year fell 1,425,000, or 3.4%, to 40,617,000, according to census figures released by the Ministry of Internal Affairs.

 http://www.japantoday.com/jp/news/397788

4 temp firms ‘in 300 mil. yen tax dodge’

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Four temporary staffing agencies in three prefectures have been accused of evading more than 300 million yen in consumption tax by establishing dummy companies to which they pretended to outsource job placements, The Yomiuri Shimbun learned Thursday.

The revelation comes at a time when the national tax authorities have been stepping up investigations into evasion of consumption tax due to the public’s high interest in the tax, which accounts for about 20 percent of the total state tax revenue.

Three of the four job placement agencies are located in Hadano and Ebina, Kanagawa Prefecture, and in Numazu, Shizuoka Prefecture, and are operated under the same name, AA TOPIC. The other agency is located in Osaka Prefecture.

The Tokyo and Nagoya regional taxation bureaus have filed a tax evasion complaint with the Yokohama and Shizuoka district public prosecutors offices against the three firms and their former president, Tomoyuki Sato, 48.

The three companies allegedly made it appear that they had dispatched personnel to clients through dummy outsourcing firms though they actually sent their employees directly to the clients, thereby evading consumption tax totaling about 230 million yen over four years until the business term ended in March last year.

They allegedly repeated the practice of establishing and liquidating dummy outsourcing companies to conceal instances of tax evasion.

According to a private credit research company, the three companies sent about 1,000 temporary factory and clerical workers to major carmakers and precision machine makers in Kanagawa and Shizuoka prefectures.

An executive of the Numazu company, whose name has been changed to Area Staff, admitted that the company had been investigated for tax evasion, but would not elaborate, saying, “Only former President Sato knows the details.”

The special investigation squad of the Osaka District Public Prosecutors Office has arrested Seiji Fujiwara, 48, president of job placement company Interu in Tadaokacho, Osaka Prefecture, on suspicion that the company evaded a total of about 82 million yen in consumption tax.

The Osaka Regional Taxation Bureau has joined the prosecutors office to conduct a probe into the case.

According to the investigation, the company dispatched its employees to a pachinko parlor for three years until the business term that ended in June 2005, but it evaded payment of the due consumption tax by making it appear that it outsourced the dispatch of temporary staff to a dummy job placement firm.

http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/dy/national/20070126TDY01003.htm