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Japan’s laborious dilemma
David McNeill
Janury 19, 2005
Japan, of course, is hardly unique in struggling to deal with the demands of
a globalised world, but it is increasingly out of step with other developed
countries, most of which have well-integrated foreign populations and laws to
protect them. Many in Japan wonder when the country will catch up
In November 2004, headlines touted a free-trade deal signed by Japanese Prime
Minister Junichiro Koizumi and Philippine President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo as
a move towards an enlightened policy on foreign workers. Allowing Filipino
caregivers to work in Japan, the agreement appeared to be a win-win,
ameliorating Japan’s need for migrant labour and generating crucial remittance
income for Filipino families. On closer inspection, however, Japan continues to
hold the rest of the world at bay, even as a looming population crisis
threatens to send the world’s second largest economy plummeting down the
economic league tables.
Most observers believe the trade deal will allow, at most, a few hundred
Filipino nurses to work indefinitely in Japan, provided they pass a demanding
Japanese proficiency test. The Philippines, which relies on remittances from
roughly 8 million of its citizens abroad to prop up its economy, would
obviously prefer that Japan accept more. Not only has Japan stalled on this
request, but the Justice Ministry announced cuts in annual entertainment visas
to Filipinos from 80,000 to 8,000. Tokyo’s new “enlightened policy” on
immigration will result in over 70,000 fewer foreigners.
The idea of substituting a visa policy that effectively supports the Japanese
sex industry, which attracts many Filipinos on entertainment visas, with one
that guarantees reasonably secure, qualified work, might appear more humane —
but, even here, the picture is not so clear. Many believe that trainee Filipino
nurses will mainly be asked to provide incapacitated elderly people with home
care, a notoriously low-paid and difficult job. Moreover, the policy sanctions
the continued break-up of Filipino families, as well as the drain of
much-needed medical talent from one of Asia’s poorest countries.
Japan’s stingy, muddled solution to the Filipino visa problem symbolises the
country’s general approach to foreign labour. Conservative bureaucrats
sometimes present the country as a sort of hermetically-sealed racial club, at
risk of being contaminated by outsiders. Until recently, even the Japan-born
children of Chinese and Korean labourers brought to the county before World War
II had to register as “aliens”.
Today, just 1.5 percent of Japan’s population is classified as foreign.
Although the government, under pressure from manufacturers, has allowed about
280,000 Brazilians to enter the country since 1990, it has done so by relying
on what anthropologist Tom Gill calls a “blood-relation” approach: Most had to
prove Japanese ancestry before receiving a visa. Says Gill, “If you could prove
you had two Japanese parents, you got a longer working visa than if you had
one; if you had a parent, you could stay longer than if you had a Japanese
grandparent, and so on.”
The current foreign-born labour force in Japan, at a fraction of one percent,
stands in stark contrast to Australia (24 percent), the United States (16
percent), Britain (5 percent), and even Ireland (7 percent), which has only
experienced large-scale immigration since the early 1990s. Further, Japan only
accepts roughly 10 asylum seekers each year. Unique among the advanced
countries, it has not taken in a single Kurdish refugee, despite its support
for the Gulf War, which led to the flight of hundreds of thousands of Kurds
from northern Iraq. As one UN official told me last year, “Japan wants all the
benefits of globalisation but none of the headaches”.
After years of holding back the foreign hordes, however, Tokyo must finally
accept that it may need immigrants — lots of them. With consistently decreasing
birth-rates, the current population of 127 million is set to plummet to just
over 100 million by 2050, shrinking the country’s labour pool by more than
one-third and dragging down national wealth. Meanwhile, Japanese life
expectancy rates continue to increase, meaning the contracting work force will
be asked to support a growing army of pensioners. According to long-time Japan
observer Alex Kerr, by 2005, there will be just two young workers supporting
each retired person, down from 11 in 1960. This is a system, in other words,
headed for collapse.
Some business and political leaders are alarmed enough to have begun looking to
the massive pool of cheap labour on Japan’s Asian doorstep. The ex-chairman of
Keidanren, Japan’s top business federation, Hiroshi Okuda, said in November
2002 that his organisation favours importing up to 6.1 million foreign workers.
Hidenori Sakanaka, director of the Tokyo Immigration Bureau, went further in
2004 when he said that Japan will have to accept close to 30 million immigrants
over the next half century. Even Tokyo governor Shintaro Ishihara, despite a
well-earned reputation for xenophobia, said in a 2003 interview that he
supports the importation of millions of legal foreign workers, although he
added he would put this process under the control of the police.
Time will tell whether such high-powered support for the previously unthinkable
in Japan — mass, controlled immigration — signals a policy change. But for now,
the clash between the demands of a business world that needs cheap, docile
foreign labour and an outdated state ideology that has taught millions of
Japanese that foreign means “alien” is visible all over the country, where
tales of discrimination are rife. Outside of the main cities, some businesses
openly display “No Foreigner” signs. Immigration authorities have set up a
controversial “snitch site” encouraging Japanese to report suspicious
foreigners, whom the police blame for rising crime rates. Meanwhile, the
government has promised to again make Japan “the world’s safest country”,
explicitly linking this goal to the attempt to slash foreign crime and halve
the number of illegal workers, currently estimated at 250,000 people.
How much of this concern about foreign crime is justified? The National Police
Agency announced in May 2004 that crime by foreigners rose again in 2003 and
that it had caught over 40,000 foreign criminals. Critics, however, point out
that one-third of these crimes were violations such as visa and other
administrative infringements, which only foreigners can commit; only 2.4
percent of all crime in Japan is committed by non-Japanese. Others accuse the
police of trying to shift the blame for soaring crime and plummeting detection
rates, which have dropped below 20 percent for the first time since the World
War II. Teranaka Makoto, secretary general of Amnesty Japan says: “The police
used to use fear of juvenile crime to increase their budget, now its
foreigners.”
Japan, of course, is hardly unique in struggling to deal with the demands of a
globalised world, but it is increasingly out of step with other developed
countries, most of which have well-integrated foreign populations and laws to
protect them. Many in Japan wonder when the country will catch up. Tony Laszlo,
director of Issho Kikaku, an NGO that researches multicultural issues in Japan
expresses these concerns: “Countries and governments can change (their
immigration policies) in two ways ... either with vision — making bold,
inventive and imaginative decisions. Or by necessity, which is more painful,
because you’re changing under duress.”
Laszlo and many others hope for the first option, but in the meantime, the
clock is ticking. Japan has a history of massive policy reversals in times of
national crisis, and may yet decide to relax its immigration laws, drop its
unofficial quotas on foreign workers, accept more refugees, and introduce an
anti-discrimination law. But it needs to act soon.
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