Lawyer putting foreigners first

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Goal to provide access to legal advice for all

Masako Suzuki has dedicated her career to giving legal support to foreigners living in Japan. Starting Monday, she will become the first head of the new Section of Legal Assistance for Foreigners at the Tokyo Public Law Office.

The section will specialize in giving legal advice to foreign residents on both criminal and civil cases, ranging from refugee assistance and visa applications to divorces and labor issues.

“With the diversification of nationalities of foreigners in Japan, legal service has become limited,” Suzuki said. “Foreigners living in Japan are also members of society supporting the country, and they must not be left behind.”

Suzuki also serves as secretary general of the Lawyers Network for Foreigners, a group of 833 lawyers nationwide working on various issues related to foreigners that was founded in May 2009. And the setup of the new legal section at the Tokyo Public Law Office is a part of their activity to increase the number of lawyers specializing in foreigners’ issues as well as improving the quality of their legal service.

Commemorating the new division, free legal consultations will be available for foreigners on Sunday at the Tokyo Public Law Office. With the assistance of the Center for Multilingual Multicultural Education and Research at Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, the service on that day will be available in 13 languages including Japanese, English, French, Spanish, Burmese, Thai and Mandarin.

Meanwhile, at the new department, languages the lawyers themselves can directly communicate in include English, Japanese and Korean, but the office will provide interpreters for other languages if and when necessary.

“One of the major reasons why lawyers are reluctant to take on cases involving foreigners is the language barrier,” Suzuki said. “We’d eventually like to be able to put together a list of interpreters to provide the information” to lawyers.

The attorney said the general attitude toward accepting foreigners in Japan has become more negative now since the Justice Ministry launched a five-year campaign in 2004 to reduce the number of illegal foreign residents by half.

“Japan has become more exclusive against foreigners recently,” Suzuki said. “There is no way that I can say Japan has become an easier place to live in than before.”

But with the low birthrate and aging society, the government has acknowledged the need to bring in foreigners.

Suzuki, however, pointed out that Japan has no fundamental policy on foreigners. “I think we are in a critical state because the government knows that the country needs foreigners but has yet to establish a clear policy,” Suzuki said. “Japan needs to squarely face the issues of foreigners in Japan — without it, there is no globalization or anything beyond.”

Free legal consultations for foreigners will be available Sunday from 1 to 4 p.m. at the Tokyo Public Law Office, Ikebukuro SIA Building 2F 1-34-5 Higashi-Ikebukuro, Toshimaku, Tokyo. Call (03) 5979-2880 or visit www.t-pblo.jp/slaf/

http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/nn20101028f1.html

Foreigners victims, perpetrators of sekuhara

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Japan sees progress on sexual harassment, but stories suggest it still has a long way to go

While the Equal Employment Opportunity Law (EEOL) was passed in 1985, it was not until 1999 that revisions to the law included definitions of sexual harassment and legal penalties for employers. These penalties, however, only allow for making the names of the offending companies public. They do not allow for the government to assess fines, nor for plaintiffs to seek punitive damages against the employer — something the U.N. Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) raised concerns about last year.

There has been, however, an increase in public awareness of sexual harassment in Japan. According to the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare, 8,120 women filed sexual harassment complaints with equal employment opportunity offices in 2008, compared with 7,706 in 2004 and 2,534 in 1997.

“Elizabeth” came to Osaka from New Zealand in her early 30s to work for the Nova English-language teaching chain, before its much-publicized bankruptcy and relaunch under G.communication. She had heard the oft-repeated mantra that Japan was one of the safest places in the world. For Elizabeth, however, life in Japan was anything but safe.

The company had housed her in a men’s hostel in Osaka. On her first day in Japan, a man grabbed her arm and pulled her towards him. She spoke no Japanese at the time, and could only understand one word he said: “hotel.” She eventually managed to break his grip and escape.

The harassment and assaults came on an almost daily basis — in the elevator, on the street and on the train. Strange men would ask for her panties — or simply climb up to her second-floor balcony and remove them from her drying rack. Men constantly approached her and asked her to accompany them to hotels; with her long, blond hair, they would assume she was a Russian prostitute, even after she attempted to convince them otherwise. Being molested on the train was a common occurrence — as it is for many women in Japan — and on one evening a man masturbated on the seat in front of her.

Her work at Nova offered no respite. She was assigned to work an 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. shift, providing lessons over the Internet. Men would engage in behavior ranging from taking her photograph to masturbating on live camera. Her complaints to her managers — both Western men — went unheeded. They were clients and they could do what they like, they would say.

On her way to work, a man on the train stuck his hand up her skirt and molested her. She had reached her breaking point. She arrived at her office in tears and told her managers of the assault.

“That’s going to happen a lot to you here,” one of them said, laughing. “You’d better get used to it.”

She had never in her life suffered the level of harassment and humiliation she experienced in those four weeks.

“I never felt so pimped out as I did at Nova,” she says. “The whole system was geared to put white women on show.”

http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/fl20101026zg.html

Protesters in Japan decry Myanmar ‘sham election’ plan

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Some 250 protesters [including members of Zenkoku Ippan Tokyo General Union] rallied in Tokyo on Wednesday to call for a boycott of next month’s election in Myanmar, decrying it as a sham for excluding the biggest opposition party.

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