Debito Arudou sees growing evidence of judicial double standards
If you’re a foreigner facing Japan’s criminal justice system, you can be questioned without probable cause on the street by police, apprehended for “voluntary questioning” in a foreign language, incarcerated perpetually while in litigation, and treated differently in jurisprudence than a Japanese.
Statistics bear this out. According to [Professor David T.] Johnson [author of “The Japanese Way of Justice”], 10 percent of all trials in Japan had foreign defendants in 2000. Considering that non-Japanese residents back then were 1.3 percent of the Japanese population, and foreign crime (depending on how you calculate it) ranged between 1 and 4 percent of the total, you have a disproportionate number of foreigners behind bars in Japan.
Feeling paranoid? Don’t. Just don’t believe the bromide that Japanese are a “peaceful, law-abiding people by nature.” They’re actually scared stiff of the police and the public prosecutor. So should you be. For until official government policy changes to make Japan more receptive to immigration, non-Japanese will be treated as a social problem and policed as such.
Marriage rate for non-regular employees half that of regular employees
Single males in non-regular employment have a much lower marriage rate than that of regular employees, a government survey has shown.
Moreover, the birth rate is lower among female non-regular workers than their regularly-employed peers, according to the survey.
The results of the survey conducted by the Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry suggest that the low marriage and birth rates are due partly to Japan’s insecure job market.
“Salaries for irregular employees are lower, and it’s harder for irregular workers to take child-care leave. These factors apparently discourage them from marrying and having children,” a ministry official said.
http://mdn.mainichi.jp/mdnnews/news/20090313p2a00m0na002000c.html
March in March 2009
Thank you to the over 400 marchers who made this year’s March in March a success!
October-March temp firings up 26% to 157,806
An estimated 157,806 nonregular employees, mainly temporary workers in the manufacturing sector, are expected to lose their jobs between last October and next month amid the recession, a labor ministry survey showed Friday.
The estimated number of job cuts during the six-month period represents a 26.4 percent rise from the Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry’s projection in its January survey, a finding highlighting the severity of the employment conditions of Japanese companies.
Temporary workers accounted for 107,375, or 68.0 percent, of the estimated 157,806 jobs being lost during the October-March period.
The remainder includes 28,877 contract employees and 12,988 workers hired by employment agencies.
Nonregular workers axed hits 158,000
Nonregular workers who have lost their jobs or will become unemployed during the October-March period number 157,806 throughout the country, more than five times the corresponding figure in late November, a Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry survey showed Friday.
The ministry conducted the survey by collating data on nonregular employees from the ministry’s Hello Work job-placement offices and regional labor bureaus across the country as of Feb. 18.
The latest figure is about 33,000 more than that recorded in a similar survey as of Jan. 26, signifying a surge from the figure of 30,067 as of Nov. 25 in the ministry’s first poll of this kind.
The latest survey results mean the number of nonregular workers who have lost or will lose their jobs has increased fivefold in the past three months.
Nonregular employees who were let go before the expiry of their contracts accounted for 41.4 percent of those surveyed.
The Labor Contract Law bans the dismissal of nonregular workers before the end of their employment contract without good reason.
Court forcibly removes sacked workers who continued to operate hotel
Tokyo District Court enforcement officers on Sunday forcibly removed sacked workers who had continued to operate a hotel in Tokyo even after it was closed down in October last year due to financial difficulties.
The situation arose after the original operator of the Keihin Hotel decided to close it down and fire its approximately 130 employees to pay back debts totaling around 6 billion yen to a Japanese affiliate of bankrupt U.S. investment bank Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.
Following the enforcement action, the dispute will move to the court where some of the former employees have filed a lawsuit seeking the nullification of the company’s decision to fire them.
[From Saturday evening through to] shortly before 6 a.m. Sunday, the former employees and labor union members [including members of NUGW Tokyo Nambu] supporting them protested in front of the hotel, located near Shinagawa station, to prevent the district court officers entering the building.
Scuffles with riot police accompanying the court officers broke out, but the officers entered the hotel at about 9:25 a.m. and finished the enforcement action around 15 minutes later.
Around 200 workers and supporters had gathered outside the hotel but no one was arrested. A former employee, who fell over and hit his head, was taken to hospital.
The former employees started operating the hotel and the restaurants in the hotel on their own a day after they were fired.
On Jan. 15, the Tokyo District Court decided to order the removal of the workers so that the building could be vacated in line with a demand from the hotel operator.
http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D95U23I80&show_article=1
Laid-off hotel workers thrown out
Officials from the Tokyo District Court evicted former workers from the Keihin Hotel in front of JR Shinagawa Station on Sunday, based on a Jan. 15 provisional ruling that supported the owner’s decision to sell the facility.
The former workers and labor union members [including members of NUGW Tokyo Nambu] who were supporting them occupied the hotel after the operator, Keihin Jitsugyo, laid off the hotel’s roughly 130 employees in October in the wake of the bankruptcy of the Lehman Brothers group in September.
Cabinet team formed to help foreign settlers
Permanent settler status is granted to foreigners of Japanese descent, Japanese who as children were left behind in China after the war and others with extraordinary circumstances. Permanent resident status is given to foreigners who have lived in Japan for a certain period and meet other criteria.
Brazilians of Japanese origin are eligible for permanent settler status, making it easier for them to work in Japan than other foreigners, who have to acquire a work visa, which involves employer sponsorship.
Brazilians with permanent settler status numbered 153,141 in 2006, accounting for 57 percent of 268,836 permanent settlers that year, according to the Justice Ministry. However, their children often have difficulties at public schools due to language problems, so many families opt to send them to private Brazilian schools.
Late last year, manufacturers began cutting foreign and Japanese temporary workers amid the stalling economy, forcing them out of company dormitories and cutting off the income needed to send their children to expensive private Brazilian schools, or even inexpensive public schools.
Prior to the downturn, companies had increased their hiring of foreigners on a temporary basis as a cheap and disposable labor source. The number of foreigners working as nonpermanent workers totaled 167,291 in June 2006, compared with 91,367 in June 2001, according to the Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry.
Hidenori Sakanaka, director general of the Japan Immigration Policy Institute, an independent think tank, hailed the Cabinet Office’s move.
“Permanent settlers and residents do not have to leave Japan even if they are unemployed (as opposed to those on a work visa), so the government must look after them as they do with unemployed Japanese,” Sakanaka said.
4,300 foreign workers face job losses
Reflecting the precarious working conditions experienced by many non-Japanese laborers, a recent government survey found roughly 4,300 foreign workers lost, or were expected to lose, their jobs as of December.
Over 30 percent of the 486,000 foreign nationals working in Japan are employed as dispatch or contract workers, the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare survey found.
http://www.asahi.com/english/Herald-asahi/TKY200901190070.html
Japan’s Brazilians demand job security as exports slow
Demanding better job and housing security, a demonstration by 300 Brazilians and their supporters [including members of the Nambu Foreign Workers Caucus] in Tokyo Sunday is just the latest sign of the impact that the global economic slowdown is having on Japan’s Brazilian-based workforce.
Waving their national flags across the busy streets of central Tokyo, the demonstrators called out, ‘Give us a chance of employment,’ ‘Stop abandoning us’ and ‘We don’t have secured housing.’
Many temporary Brazilian workers have lost jobs recently, primarily in the car and electronics industries, as Japanese exports have slumped due to the sluggish economy and the Japanese yen’s gains against other currencies. Others have been informed of planned layoffs in the spring.
Dosantos Marcos, one of the protesters, told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa he was told to stay at home, since production is slow at the car parts plant where he worked for seven years. The 42-year-old Brazilian has not worked for two months.
Since September last year, when exporters began reducing production, planes to Brazil have been fully booked, according to Hidekichi Hashimoto, the third-generation Japanese-Brazilian President of the non-profit organization ABC Japan.
‘For Japanese companies, we are the easiest to cut because most of us don’t speak Japanese and they think that we have no intention of staying long,’ Hashimoto said.
But about 80,000 of the 320,000 Brazilians living in Japan have acquired the residency visa necessary to stay permanently, he said.
Takaharu Hayashi, director of Koryunet, a Brazilian-Japanese networking association in the Aichi prefecture, has received numerous calls from Brazilians working at auto factories. Toyota Motor Corp, also headquartered in Aichi prefecture, plans to cut 3,000 non- regular workers.
‘Japanese companies are saying they can’t help it when Japanese are also having difficulties keeping their jobs,’ Hayashi said. ‘There is a mentality that Japanese business owners are trying to push Brazilians to the lowest strata because they are less visible.’
As of December last year, more than 85,000 Japanese temporary workers were set to lose their jobs by the end of March.
During the New Year holiday, some 300 unemployed Japanese temporary workers gathered at a park in Tokyo to receive free lodging and food. Most were able to receive government welfare subsidies and find apartments in a week and began job search.
But Hayashi said Brazilians who have not established the necessary relations within Japanese society to help them find resources to tackle their hardships.
‘They don’t have the safety net that Japanese workers do,’ Hayashi said. ‘The gravity of a layoff is weighed much heavier on Brazilians because the government has no system to rescue them from the troubles and their options are much more limited than the Japanese.’