Bloomberg on J economy: refers to J immigration from China

mytest

Hi Blog. Got this from Heidi Tan over at Bloomberg (thanks). A Sept 29 podcast from Bloomberg Radio, interviewing Robert Feldman, chief economist at Morgan Stanley Japan Securities, over economic issues and Fukuda’s “steady hand”. One thing brought up was immigration. Here’s how Mr Feldman, who has been “a Japan watcher for 37 years”, assesses the situation:

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(Minute seven)
Q: Is there a change in immigration within the Japanese people?

A: Yes there is. Immigrants are now really welcome by a large share of the population. Obviously, large-scale immigration is something new to Japan. They’re not sure about it. It’s also a huge issue in many other countries around the globe. And so Japan is watching what’s happening in the United States and in Europe with immigration policy. From my perspective, I see a very large number of Japanese people very much welcoming young, eager, aggressive people who want to come to Japan and make their lives there. We have now between 400,000 and 450,000 foreign-born workers in Japan. That’s not a huge number. But most of these are very young people. A huge number are from China. Young, hardworking kids who want to come and make something out of themselves. And quite interestingly, until a couple of years ago, there was a lot of talk in the media in Japan about crime coming in with these foreign workers. You see almost no discussion of that anymore. I think the immigrant groups have proven themselves to be very hardworking, very good citizens, and that’s helping the image of immigration. So yes, immigration will be part of the story, but inevitably it cannot be the main line.

Q: What is the response to the Chinese coming into Japan?

A: I think a lot of them come because they want to work. They have opportunities there, they read the kanji well enough so it’s easy enough to get around. So I think the young Chinese community in Japan is very very happy to be there. I witnessed a very interesting sort of event a couple of weeks ago. I was visiting the Meiji Shrine in Tokyo… As you enter the main shrine, there a place where according to Shinto religion you’re supposed to wash off your hands… And there was a group of young Chinese kids there, who were about to go into the shrine. And they were being very very serious and solicitious about washing their hands properly before they went into the shrine. As a sign of respect towards the Meiji Emperor. And I thought it was just lovely, that this group of immigrants was so serious about honoring the traditions of the country where they had come to at least work for a while.
http://www.bloomberg.com/tvradio/podcast/ontheeconomy.html
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COMMENT FROM ARUDOU DEBITO: I’m not sure I can be quite so rosy in outlook right now. Granted, Mr Feldman’s appraisal of Japan’s future labor market actually included immigration for a change (as opposed to the three-page survey in the July 26, 2007 Economist, which irresponsibly ignored it completely). But I’m not so sure about Chinese being “really welcome” (given the short-term revolving-door visa policies that both the ruling party and the bureaucrats want, moreover the “Japanese Only” policies that are even starting to target Chinese in particular) or “very very happy” to be here. Given the harsh working conditions many of them face, I wonder how many Chinese in Japan Mr Feldman talked to create his happiness index, or even his assimilation quotient (just seeing them being respectful of shrine customs does not to me necessarily signal their respect for a Japanese emperor, or the fact that the crowd of Chinese were even immigrants; given the rush of Chinese tourism these past few years, we haven’t eliminated the possibility that they might have been tourists on their best behavior).

And as for the “almost no discussion” regarding foreign crime, the biannnual press releases from the NPA on it still score headlines (see some effects of the last media blitz last February here). Even the current Justice Minister Hatoyama has made it clear he intends to stay the course of toughness towards foreign crime. It’s even been transmuted into anti-terrorism bills.

That said, caveats on my part: I don’t live in Tokyo, and every time I go down south I’m surprised at just how many NJ, particularly Chinese, are working in restaurants, hotels, and convenience stores–and that’s not even touching upon NJ working in less public-view places such as factories and nightlife. I might not be seeing what he’s seeing by living in Sapporo, which is not a terribly international or cosmopolitan place. Plus having my eyes on the problems and issues regarding the negative could be biasing my sample (or just making me old and cynical). But the fact that the larger group (even larger than Chinese) of Newcomer NJ worker immigrants in Japan–the Brazilians–doesn’t even warrant a mention in his assessment (they’re found farther west, away from Kanto) indicates to me that Mr Feldman doesn’t get out of Tokyo much.

I do of course hope he’s right, of course. I just don’t think that based upon what he says above that he has sufficient evidence to back up such rosy assertions, especially given the default government-sponsored policy of treating NJ as inferior workers and portraying them in public as agents of social problems.

Thanks for letting me know about the podcast, Bloomberg. Arudou Debito in Sapporo

J Times debate on reinstating fingerprinting for NJ

mytest

Hi Blog. Sorry to have missed this debate on reinstating fingerprinting for NJ only in the Japan Times Community Page last June. Since cyberspace is quite incandescent with outrage at the moment over the November revisions to the laws, here are the pros and cons by two friends of mine, Scott and Matt. Which do you find more convincing?

More on the issue on Debito.org here, and Amnesty International/SMJ’s October 27 Tokyo Forum on it here. Comment from me and links to referential articles below the articles…

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Japan Times Community Page Tuesday, June 6, 2006
THE ZEIT GIST
Should Japan fingerprint foreigners?
Two views of a pressing issue

PRO ARGUMENT
By SCOTT T. HARDS
Immigration’s new system will make us safer

http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/fl20060606z2.html

Over the protests of human-rights activists and groups like the Japan Federation of Bar Associations, Japan recently amended its Immigration Control Law to require that all foreigners (except “special” permanent residents) be photographed and fingerprinted when entering the country beginning November 2007. The plan mimics the “U.S.-Visit” program in the United States, which has been in place since late 2003.

The most vigorous arguments against the plan attack its use of fingerprints.

Even Nichibenren suggests that if the plan must be adopted, it should drop fingerprinting. Why? Because in Japan, public authorities’ only use of fingerprints is in criminal investigations, they say, and therefore it violates one’s dignity.

Indeed, all criminals are fingerprinted, but that doesn’t mean all people fingerprinted are criminals. The “green cards” of permanent resident foreigners in the U.S. have shown their fingerprint for decades. People in high-security or sensitive jobs are fingerprinted, too.

Some countries require fingerprints for passports now, and many more are proposing such a measure. Fingerprints are being used for biometric ID on ATMs and even cell phones for online transactions.

Clearly their role has evolved far beyond just crime investigations. And as their use continues to diversify, public feelings are likely to evolve toward a neutral view, too.

Fingerprints are just one form of biometric identification. Ironically, they are not even the most widely-used form, even in law enforcement. That throne belongs to photographs, which are in many ways much more “personal” data than fingerprints.

Yet you don’t hear anyone complaining that being photographed is “degrading” or “makes them feel like a criminal.”

In the end, when public safety is at stake, worrying about hurting people’s feelings is just not good policy. Airline security, for example, with its body pat-downs and shoe removal almost seems designed to violate one’s dignity. It’s unpleasant, yes, but necessary.

Other criticism of the program has focused on suggestions that it won’t be effective in preventing terrorists from entering Japan, that it will be too costly, and that it violates the “dignity” of travelers. But are these convincing arguments for abandoning the plan at a time when the risks from terrorism are clear?

For starters, critics of Japan’s plan suggest it simply won’t work. After all, they point out, the 9/11 terrorists were in the U.S. legally. While true, keep in mind they traveled extensively around the world before coming to the U.S. Had such a program been in place years before, it may have stopped them.

Another hole seems to be the program’s inability to stop a terrorist who lacks a criminal record, since it relies on database lookups to identify people. That, too, is true, but no one is suggesting that this program will perfectly prevent all terror.

That’s impossible, especially when the terrorist is willing to sacrifice their own life. Still, even if an attack is carried out, the data provided by a program like this can be valuable after-the-fact in tracking down the organizations responsible, and thereby preventing future incidents.

What’s more, terrorists aren’t the only ones that may be snared. According to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (USDHS), since January 2004, over 1,000 visa violators and other criminals have been arrested through the U.S.-Visit program. And keeping people like that out is in the public’s interest.

For fiscal 2007, the U.S.-Visit program will spend roughly $ 400 million. Developing the program cost another $ 1.5 billion. Japan — which has far fewer ports of entry and international visitors than the U.S. — could probably get by on a third to a quarter of that amount.

Is it worth it? The direct costs from 9/11 in property destruction and rescue efforts have been estimated at a whopping $ 27 billion. Medium-term, the impact on the U.S. economy due to drops in travel and tourism, increased insurance premiums and other effects is said to have been about $ 500 billion. And of course, the “cost” of the thousands of lives lost can never be measured.

Indeed, 9/11 was an exceptional case. But given that U.S.-Visit’s budget is less than 1 percent of the total outlays of the USDHS, it doesn’t seem like an unreasonable expenditure in light of its antiterrorism goal.

A government’s primary responsibility is to protect its citizens. Fingerprinting all foreign travelers will help do just that by creating a database that will help keep terrorists and criminals out of the country.

What’s more, shared with law enforcement agencies globally, it can be a powerful tool to help reduce the very real threat posed by international terrorism.
ENDS
///////////////////////////////////////////////////

CON ARGUMENT
By MATT DIOGUARDI
Fingerprinting puts foreign residents at risk

http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/fl20060606z2.html
Courtesy Matt Dioguardi’s blog at
http://japan.shadowofiris.com/politics/foreigners-are-suspected-criminals/

Imagine you live in a small town. Every time a crime is committed the police come to your door and escort you to the police station, take your fingerprints, and compare them to those found at the crime scene.

As you are the only person so regularly singled out, you ask, “Hey, why always me?” The answer is, “if you’re innocent, why worry about it?”

Eventually after your visits to the police station become almost daily, you plead with the officers to leave you alone. One of them has a revelation: “Hey, instead of destroying your fingerprints each time, let’s make a permanent record! Then, every time there’s a crime we’ll use that?”

Problem solved? Of course not. Having had enough, you spit in outrage, “why me? Why is it always my fingerprints and not anyone else’s you compare to those found at crime scenes?” One officer smiles sheepishly and explains, “it’s because you’re a foreigner.”

Sound unrealistic? Unfortunately, it’s not. It’s a reality. It’s already happened in the U.S., and it will soon be happening here.

Do you wish to enter Japan? Then you are suspect. Before you can enter you must turn over your fingerprints and allow them to be cross checked against an international list of criminals and terrorists. And that’s just the beginning.

The prints will remain on record for 70 years. According to the new procedures, if requested, the Justice Ministry will turn over the data to the police and other government agencies.

What’s that mean? It means like our fictional character in the beginning of this story, that for any crime committed in Japan, there is a high probability that you will be treated as a de facto suspect.

While no citizens will have to submit fingerprints by default, yours will already be there. And you’d better believe you are a de facto suspect in each case. It’ll be as easy as pushing a few buttons on a computer.

Is it fair for a foreigner to be a de facto suspect in potentially any crime in Japan where fingerprints are lifted? No.

The Japan Federation of Bar Associates has come out strongly against this measure. (See: http://www.nichibenren.or.jp/ja/publication/booklet/data/nyukanhou_qa.pdf)

Among the many useful arguments they make, they point out that the measure might well stigmatize foreigners as somehow being more inherently capable of crime than Japanese.

They also note that it is clearly unconstitutional under Article 13. And yes, the constitution does apply to people seeking entry into Japan. They may not be citizens, but they are people.

Ultimately, this policy puts foreigners at unfair risk. I typed in the phrase “how to fake fingerprints” on Google recently and got back over half a million hits. I checked the first 60, which told you how to do just that.

You leave your fingerprints everywhere you go. You leave them on trains, on vending machines, any place you lay your hands. Foreigners will have to take this in stride as they become de facto suspects in almost every crime committed.

There are respected scholars, former police officers, and journalists now questioning the entire science of fingerprinting. And whose to say how long it takes before collected prints are leaked through Winnie?

Putting all this aside, guess what? This policy just won’t work. Does anyone really believe that all terrorists are foreigners? The Tokyo subway sarin attack comes to mind (6000 injured, 12 dead), so does the bombings of Mitsubishi Heavy Industries in Tokyo in 1974 (20 injured, 8 dead) and the Hokkaido Prefectural Government office in Sapporo in 1976 (80 injured, 2 dead). The obvious prejudice here is palpable.

Lest anyone forget, most of the 9/11 terrorists entered America legally. Terrorists often have clean records and are not on watch lists.

So if not terrorists, who is on the watch lists? Well as the Justice Ministry will rely on an international list, in many cases they have no way of knowing.

There have already been credible reports of activists in America being detained because their names turned up on terrorists watch lists (simply a mistake?).

Recently some British citizens were outraged when they found that their names had been put into a criminal database (more mistakes?).

Terrorists with clean records will be able to enter, ordinary people will be hindered and face rights abuses.

If none of this is enough, has anyone stopped to even fathom the cost involved here?

So what you have here is a ineffective policy that clearly discriminates against foreigners and costs a bundle of cash.

In short, the worst of all worlds.
ENDS
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COMMENT FROM ARUDOU DEBITO

The biggest problem I see with this new copycat biometric system (aside from the fact that it’s not even being instituted nationwide–only at Narita, which means elsewhere everyone foreign goes through the Gaijin Line regardless of whether or not they are actually a resident of Japan) was not really alluded to in Scott’s argument–that if you really want to take care of terrorists, you fingerprint everybody. After all, if you’ve done nothing wrong, you’ve got nothing to fear, even if you’re Japanese, right?

I’ve said this before, but there is no reason to target NJ only like this, except for the fact that you can. Given the cultural disfavor with fingerprinting in Japan (essentially, only criminals or suspected criminals get systematically fingerprinted in Japan–this association is one of the reasons why the Zainichi generational foreigners successfully protested for decades to get it abolished in the 1990’s), if you included Japanese in the fingerprinting there would be outrage, and the policy would fail. Look what happened when they tried to institute the Juki Net universal ID card system earlier this decade (it was even ruled unconstitutional in 2006).

I been watching this come down the pipeline for years now, and have of course been writing about it. See the roots of this policy and what sorts of discriminatory logic it is founded upon (i.e. clear and systematic racial profiling, both in essence, and in an enforcement which bends existing laws) in a 2006 Mainichi article and a 2005 Japan Times column. Arudou Debito in Sapporo

THE ZEIT GIST
Here comes the fear
Antiterrorist law creates legal conundrums for foreign residents
By Arudou Debito, Japan Times, May 24, 2005

Japan to fingerprint foreigners under proposed immigration bill
Mainichi Shinbun, February 8, 2006

Both at
https://www.debito.org/japantimes052405.html
ENDS

Mainichi: Iranian acquitted of indecent assault over lack of evidence

mytest

Hi Blog. Here’s a bit of hope for Mr Idubor, accused similarly of a sexual crime and still being held for eight months now despite no evidence.

A person’s (a NJ, to boot) case has been dismissed for “lack of evidence”. Good. Pity it took over a year and a half to come to this conclusion.

What I also find rather amusing about the case below is the “fondling”, causing “slight neck injuries”? What are we talking about here, hickies?

Case dismissed. Debito.

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Man acquitted of indecent assault over lack of evidence
Mainichi Shinbun September 28, 2007

http://mdn.mainichi-msn.co.jp/national/news/20070928p2a00m0na010000c.html
Courtesy of Ben Shearon

YOKOHAMA — A man has been acquitted of the indecent assault of a woman at his home in January last year, due to lack of evidence.

The Yokohama District Court found the defendant, an antique goods dealer and an Iranian national, not guilty for a lack of evidence. Prosecutors had demanded that the accused spend four years behind bars for indecent assault, resulting in injury.

Presiding Judge Kenichi Kurita pointed out that the alleged victim’s testimony changed during the trial and could not be trusted, declaring, “It cannot be concluded that the man molested her despite her will.”

The man was charged with fondling the body of a 32-year-old acquaintance at his home in Midori-ku, Yokohama, on Jan. 28, 2006, causing her slight neck injuries. (Mainichi)

==================================

強制わいせつ:イラン国籍の男性に無罪 横浜地裁
http://www.mainichi-msn.co.jp/shakai/jiken/news/20070928k0000e040045000c.html
 知人女性の体を触るなどしたとして強制わいせつ致傷罪に問われたイラン国籍の古物商の男性に対し横浜地裁は27日、「犯罪の証明がない」として無罪(求刑・懲役4年)を言い渡した。
 男性は06年1月28日、横浜市緑区の自宅で、知人の女性(当時32歳)の体を触るなどしたうえ、首に軽傷を負わせたとして起訴された。しかし栗田健一裁判長は判決で女性の公判での供述の変遷などから「全体として信用できず、男性が女性の意志に反してわいせつな行為をしたとまで断定できない」と指摘した。【鈴木一生】
英文を読む
毎日新聞 2007年9月28日 11時26分
ENDS

Next Valentine Lawsuit Hearing Tuesday Sept 25

mytest

Hi Blog. Just received this from Valentine:

Dear Debito.
Please, kindly remind your bloggers about the date for my court attendance. 25th Tuesday September, 2007 at the Tokyo High Court, Kasumigaseki. by 1.30pm 8 floor Rm 808. Thanks, Valentine

Attend if you like. More on the Valentine Lawsuit, where he was denied medical treatment for a broken leg while being interrogated by police (and is now crippled), and then the lower court exonerated the police of any respnsiblity on extremely flimsy grounds, at https://www.debito.org/valentinelawsuit.html

Debito in Sapporo

Fun Facts #8: Stuff gleaned from Seidensticker’s “Tokyo Rising”

mytest

Hi Blog. Been stampeding through the late Edward Seidensticker’s book TOKYO RISING (borrowed from FCCJ library, but two weeks is simply not long enough for me to get through a book; I like to suck on them over months and am never faithful to one tome unless it’s really good), and these are some things that popped up for Debito.org:

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One powerful force in the workings of the city and the prefecture is not entirely under the control of the prefectural government: the police. The chief of the Tokyo prefecutral police is appointed by a national police agency with the approval of the prime minister and upon the advice of a prefectural police commission, which is in effectual. None of these agencies is under the control of governor and council. Tokyo becomes a police city when it is thought necessary to guard against the embarrassment of having someone shoot at a president or a queen or a pope [or a Beatle; see more about the concert gone so badly in 1966–3000 police seated to make sure 10,000 Budoukan spectators didn’t even stand up during the concert–that the Beatles never returned to Japan as a group to perform]. It has more than twice as many policemen as Osaka, though it is less than twice as large in population. The problem of police excesses is by no means limited to Tokyo–it was in Kanagawa Prefecture that a case of illegal eavesdropping was uncovered in 1986–but it is most conspicuous in the prefecture in which national embarrassments are most likely to occur. (page 169)
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This might be one reason why the Tokyo Police (keishichou) seem to be much more assiduous in their Gaijin Card Checkpoints than anywhere else in the country…

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There was in those days [during the Occupation] the problem of the “third nationals” [sangokujin]. It was conspicuous in the underworld and in gang squabbling. Third nationals were for practical purposes Chinese and Koreans resident in Japan [i.e. the Zainichis]. The expression put them in their place, distinguishing them both from Japanese and from the Occupation, which favored them, treating Chinese as allies and Koreans as quasi allies (enemies of the enemy). It is hard to deny that they took advantage of their position.

If the police couild not intercede in behalf of Japanese gangs that thought of themselves (or at any rate advertised themselves) as Robin Hoods and defenders of the Japanese spirit, there is much evidence that they managed to aid them surreptitiously. In the “Shimbashi Incident” of 1946, American military police and Japanese police intervened to prevent an armed battle between Chinese and Japanese gangs for control of the market. The nonbattle was in effect a victory for the Japanese. It showed the Chinese, who were progressively weaker, that they could not have everything their way even in that day of confusion and demoralization. Across the bay in Chiba, later in 1946, the police seem to have actualy encouraged a showdown between Japanese and third-national gangs. It would be the occasion, the Chiba police and the American military police agreed, for rounding up gangsters of whatever natioanlity. The Japanese police told the Japanese gangs what was to happen and invited their cooperation. The Americans do not seem to have accorded the same favor to the third nationals. The encounter took place, a few minutes of gunfire in which several men were wounded but no one was killed, and in the end only third nationals were rounded up. (page 154-155)
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The most powerful force in getting [the postwar Japanese economy] moving again came fairly late. The Korean War broke out in June 1950, almost exactly at midpoint thorugh what we may call the decade of the rebuilding. For Korea it was a terrible happening, for Japan a momentous one, with little sense of the terrible… It was perhaps natural in an occupied country that had no foreign policy save to get rid of the Occupation and export things wherever possible…

Momentous the event certainly was for all that. Japanese profits from the Korean War were massive and they went into rebuilding city and land, and bring them back somewhat near, in material terms, the position that had been theirs before the folly of the forties. Procurement contracts in the remaining months of 1950 ran to $180 milion, and before the Korean War was over they ran to $2.3 billion. Production returned to and passed prewar levels. Direct Ameircan aid, which had been necessary in the immediate postwar years, now ceased to be. Brave beginnings had already been made towards putting things together again, but it was in the early fifties that matters went forward with speed and purpose… Yet it is ironic that the prosperity of a country which has renounced war (see Article IX of the postwar constitution) is founded on a war. (page 155-156)
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All-in-all, in TOKYO RISING Seidensticker has created a book that is okay for those who really know something about Tokyo or Japan already (it’s a work that would thrill academic specialists in the field, but if they assigned it to their students with only incipient knowledge of Japan it would leave them nonplussed). For me, after 20 years here, it’s a decent read–it fills a lot of holes and answers a lot of lingering questions. For anyone else, it would probably be a head-scratcher. It would merely promote Japan as a land of impenetrable exotica (which is the wont of this generation of Japan specialists anyway, IMO), instead of as a land of quirks working under a mostly rational system. It takes a lot of experiences before people see the rationality. I’m sure Seidensticker himself saw it too, but he really doesn’t communicate that at all well. Too much reliance on novelists (with largely boring or uncontexted excerpts from their writings) as primary sources of information as well.

This is one of the reasons I refused to read “specialist” books on Japan for so long, until I had built up my own set of experiences from which to get the hang of this place. Now that I have gotten the hang, I find it amazing how so many books on Japan are written by those who don’t have the hang, or can’t communicate that they do.

Arudou Debito in Sapporo

J Times on new Justice Minister Hatoyama Kunio

mytest

Hi Blog. Just ran across this in the Japan Times. Decent profile by Jun Hongo on new Justice Minister Hatoyama Kunio.

I enclose the entire article, but boldface the bits pertinent to Debito.org. Comment follows article.

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The Japan Times: Tuesday, Sept. 4, 2007
CABINET INTERVIEW
NEW JUSTICE MINISTER
Hatoyama a hawk on death penalty, illegal immigrants

By JUN HONGO, Staff writer
Courtesy http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/nn20070904a5.html

When he appointed Kunio Hatoyama as justice minister Aug. 27, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe requested that the veteran lawmaker help Japan regain its recognition as one of the world’s safest countries.

Facing reporters later that day, Hatoyama was quick to display his determination to heed Abe’s call, quickly supporting capital punishment and pointing to the threat of crimes committed by foreigners.

“The death penalty embodies preventive functions against crimes. I disagree with abolishing the system,” the 58-year-old stated in his first news conference at the Justice Ministry. “Cutting the number of illegal immigrants in half is also a goal for this administration. We must tighten up immigration management to achieve that,” he said, referring to the growing perception that more crimes are being committed by foreign nationals.

Hatoyama, a conservative hawk who makes frequent visits to Yasukuni Shrine, hails from a prominent political family. His grandfather, Ichiro, was a prime minister, and his father, Iichiro, a foreign minister. Hatoyama’s older brother, Yukio, is secretary general of the Democratic Party of Japan.

The Tokyo native began his political career as a secretary to his father and the late Prime Minister Kakuei Tanaka before winning a seat in the 1976 Lower House election.

Hatoyama later went through a period of turbulence, leaving the Liberal Democratic Party in 1993 and helping form the DPJ in 1996, only to resign as a lawmaker three years later and run for Tokyo governor in 1999. When that failed, he ran on the LDP ticket and won a Lower House seat in 2000.

Although Hatoyama has served as both education and labor minister, the tasks he faces at the Justice Ministry require trickier decision-making, especially authorizing hangings. But he pledged to make advancements during his stint in office.

In an interview Friday, he said the death-row population, reduced to 103 after Hatoyama’s predecessor, Jinen Nagase, sent three to the gallows last month, is still “a large number.”

“One must be extra careful in approving death penalties because it is about ending human life,” Hatoyama said, but added that failure to authorize capital punishment runs against the nature of the legal system.

“Executions should be carried out aptly” under the Constitution, he said.

Regarding long-term policies for accepting overseas workers, Hatoyama said the government could add more job categories for which foreign nationals with skills and expertise can apply.

But he disagreed with some of Nagase’s proposals to open the market and accept manual laborers and unskilled workers.

“Considering Japan’s culture, I must question whether that is a good idea,” Hatoyama said. “This may not be the right thing to say, but that could provoke an increase in crimes by foreign nationals.”

Asked if he intends to reject Nagase’s proposal, Hatoyama simply stated, “I am the justice minister (now).”

A close friend to LDP Secretary General Taro Aso, Hatoyama promised not only to “become a good justice minister” but also support Abe and his Cabinet in the wake of the LDP-New Komeito ruling bloc’s loss of its majority in the July Upper House election.

“This Cabinet is facing a difficult time, but I believe it’s healthy for Cabinet members to feel pressure and tension,” he said. “I will make use of my connection with my brother if that is required anytime in the future.”

———————-
The Japan Times: Tuesday, Sept. 4, 2007
Other JT Cabinet Member profiles (August 2007 – )
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COMMENT: I don’t think the JT article has it quite right regarding former Justice Minister’s stance on guest workers. It’s not a complete “opening up of the market”–Nagase supported a program in which people would be sent back within three years, regardless of any experience they gained under Japan’s two-decade old “trainee etc” program. It’s not an open-door policy; it’s a revolving-door policy.

I agree with Hatoyama that we need to create a brain drain into Japan with encouragement of skilled labor. But he’s barking up the wrong tree (as is the JT article’s claim of a “growing perception” of rising foreign crime, which is unsubstantiated and debatable given last season’s quietly-announced drop in NJ crime) when it comes to claiming that bringing in foreigners will result in more illegals and proportionally more crime. The historical record suggests the opposite.

The onus must also be placed upon the employer to make sure they are passing skills and employing NJ laborers as they promised to. Up to now, the “researcher” and “trainee” visas have had widespread examples of just employing people (even in violation of even Japanese labor laws) to (famously) pound sheet metal and clean pig sties at ridiculously low wages. In other words, an “unskilled guest worker” program is already in place without calling it as such. Nagase just wanted to call it as such, and cap the contracts.

Sorry, neither plan will work properly and to Japan’s long-term benefit (demographically and fiscally) until you give people a stake in living here. And that is called immigration.

Arudou Debito in Sapporo

J Today/Shuukan Shinchou on Ikebukuro Police’s “Gaijin Hostess Hunt”

mytest

Hi Blog. A little something that has been lying latent in my files but hasn’t really found a home anywhere pointwise. Just a report from Mark Schreiber based on the Weeklies of how crackdowns on visas are leading to raids on bars. Quick comment follows article, of course.

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POLICE, IMMIGRATION LAUNCH JOINT “GAIJIN HOSTESS HUNT” IN KINSHICHOU, IKEBUKURO
Japan Today.com Kuchikomi Column, from Shuukan Shinchou Weekly Magazine
Wednesday, July 18, 2007

http://www.japantoday.com/jp/kuchikomi/475
Courtesy of the Author

Watering holes in the area around JR Kinshicho station in Tokyo’s Sumida Ward have long been known to employ hostesses from Russia, the Ukraine, Moldova and other countries of the former Soviet Union.

Last month, at one particular establishment, the music was pulsing to a lively beat and the drinks were flowing when several men in dark jumpsuits pushed their way inside and shouted, “Turn off the music! Everybody stay where they are. Show us your passports!”

Yes, reports Shukan Shincho (July 19), it was indeed a raid by the much-dreaded “immigration police.”

The foreign hostesses were herded into a corner of the bar, and those found to be working on tourist visas were herded out in groups of twos and threes. Inebriated customers, lurking outside the door, raised angry voices in protest.

During June, the Tokyo Metropolitan Police and Immigration Bureau staged a series of joint crackdowns on these so-called “gaijin clubs” in Kinshicho and Ikebukuro, in search of visa violators.

”From June 15 to 18, the authorities mobilized 370 staff to conduct raids, including house searches,” an unnamed reporter at a city desk tells the magazine. “This was the largest raid they’ve conducted in quite some time. They went after Russian clubs and made 14 arrests, and remanded 35 more women to immigration on visa violation charges.”

Most of the clubs hit in the raid employed over 10 women, and several were forced to shut down, Shukan Shincho notes. However, this “gaijin hostess hunt,” as the magazine describes it, appears to have been aimed at a specific operator.

”The main targets were shops run by the ‘M’ group, which is widely established in Ikebukuro and Kinshicho,” the manager of a Russian club is quoted as saying. “It’s got a reputation for hiring eastern European women here on working holiday or tourist visas, but it was overdoing things, and attracted too much attention.”

Needless to say, the magazine notes, such work violations have become rampant in Japan’s “mizu shobai.” But this latest crackdown has left the operators of other gaijin clubs filled with trepidation that they might be the targets of the next crackdown.

July 18, 2007
//////////////////////////////////////////

QUICK COMMENT:

If things are going to go this far, let’s hope the press also reports on how their employers get it in the neck too.

Another related article regarding bar crackdowns on Debito.org:

https://www.debito.org/?p=13 (See item 3 on Hiroshima Bar “El Barco” on how police raids target by clientele and then sift bar occupants by race–even when there’s no particular fear of the “staff” “overstaying”.) Excerpt:

============================
“The directors have been arrested for making/having customers dance without a night entertainment permit. There is in fact only one establishment in Hiroshima that actually holds all the licenses technically required under the Night Entertainment Business Control Act. Obtaining such a permit however places limits on the hours that a business can stay open. El Barco is registered as a late night business (mayonaka eigyou), however, that does not permit dancing. It is not possible to obtain both permits, meaning that under current Japanese law it is legally impossible to run an establishment where you can drink and dance late into the night. It thus follows that this is matter of concern for all late night dance clubs across Japan. We also have reservations about the manner in which the arrests were carried out, with over 50 police officers, immigration officials and riot police raiding El Barco late Saturday night to arrest only two people for a permit violation…”
(continues at above website link)

============================

Arudou Debito in Sapporo
ENDS

Japan Times on Asashoryu and the National NJ Blame Game (UPDATED)

mytest

Hi Blog. I’ve just webbed two recent Japan Times Community Page articles, summarized as follows:

//////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
The scapegoating of Asashoryu
Champion’s antics are least of sumo’s worries

The Japan Times: Tuesday, Sept. 4, 2007
THE ZEIT GIST
By JAMES ERIKSSON and ARUDOU DEBITO
Special to The Japan Times, Column 39 for the Japan Times Community Page
Courtesy http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/fl20070904zg.html
Based upon an Internet essay at https://www.debito.org/?p=542

EXCERPT:
============================
…Some might say Asa has long had it coming. He’s known as the bad boy of sumo, reputedly showing violent tendencies toward junior wrestlers and, according to the weeklies and wide shows, even his wife.

Therefore his record, in a sport where winning is everything, was the only thing keeping the hounds at bay.

But it’s not as if he stopped winning. What’s changed is that as of May we finally have another yokozuna, Hakuho. It seems Asashoryu is now expendable.

The point is, the whole soccer-sumo scandal is a smoke-screen. Sumo is in a panic and needs a scapegoat…
============================
Whole article at https://www.debito.org/japantimes090407.html

SEE UPDATE ON THIS ISSUE AT BOTTOM

////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

The blame game
Convenience, creativity seen in efforts
to scapegoat Japan’s foreign community

The Japan Times: Tuesday, Aug. 28, 2007
THE ZEIT GIST
By ARUDOU DEBITO
Special to The Japan Times, Column 38 for the Japan Times Community Page
Courtesy http://search.japantimes.co.jp/print/fl20070828zg.html

“Director’s Cut”, with information included that did not appear in print or online at the Japan Times, available at https://www.debito.org/japantimes082807.html

EXCERPT:
============================
We live in interesting times, where Japan’s economy and society have been at a crossroads–for nearly two decades.

With the shortage and high cost of domestic labor, the Japanese government has imported record numbers of cheap foreign workers. Even though whole industrial sectors now depend on foreign labor, few publicly accept the symbiosis as permanent. Instead, foreigners are being blamed for Japan’s problems.

Scapegoating the alien happens worldwide, but Japan’s version is particularly amusing. It’s not just the garden-variety focus on crime anymore: Non-Japanese are being blamed for problems in miltary security, sports, education — even shipping. Less amusing is how authorities are tackling these “problems” — by thwarting any chances of assimilation…
============================
Rest of the article at https://www.debito.org/japantimes082807.html

Enjoy. Arudou Debito in Sapporo

//////////////////////////////////////////////

UPDATE: Doreen Simmons, Grand Dame of Sumo, comments in the Kansai Time Out (September 2007) on the Asa controversy. Courtesy of Steve. In PDF format, download from Debito.org here:

https://www.debito.org/asasimmonskto.pdf

COMMENT: I don’t claim to know anywhere even near what Doreen knows, but my reaction is one of general disappointment with her essay. It’s not all that well written (it goes kerplunk at the end, with no conclusion), indicating to me that like movie director Kurosawa Akira, she’s gotten too senior in society to take an edit.

James thought there was no new ground covered, just rehash plus history. I would agree–there’s nothing covered in depth, such as examining the possible motives re WHY Asa is being carpeted this much now. The media has jumped on Asa in the past, but this time all things seem to be in confluence–so well that one could make an argument that the JSA is trying to force Asa out by making things too uncomfortable for him to stay. He could thus quit without tarnishing Sumo’s Mongolian connection. Bit of a stretch, yes. But let’s allude to it even if only to eliminate it.

Even though historically, as Doreen noted in her article, Asa is getting plenty more rope compared to other defrocked wrestlers, James and I see the JSA even going so far as fanning the flames around Asa themselves, in order to take the heat off their own excesses. It’s not as if Asa has all the same tools at his disposal (such as they are in the Sumo world) as a regular J rikishi to defend himself. He’s not even a native speaker.

In sum, Doreen is not at all questioning the very fabric of Sumo, which helps create these uncontrollable sumo “frankensteins” that the JSA have to reel in from time to time. My feeling after reading is that Doreen was just informing us how much she knows about the sport, and indirectly chiding anyone for commenting on Sumo at all without her level of knowledge (which she’ll impart at her convenience, thank you very much).

That was certainly the feeling I got when I asked Doreen for comment before I submitted the above essay to the Japan Times (she had very kindly corrected a point raised in the COUNTERPOINT essay we wrote last week, thanks).

Her response (excerpt):
=============================
“There is so much to take issue with, and it would take a couple of hours at least. Although I was extremely busy before, I found time to point out just one glaring error, in the Onaruto story — but why should I clean up somebody else’s article free of charge? If invited, I will be happy to write a rebuttal — for a fee.”
=============================

Sorry to have bothered her. Also glad she was paid for her opinions (such as they are) by the KTO, not me. Arudou Debito in Sapporo

Japan Times Aug 14 on Valentine Case, plus new JT column Aug 28

mytest

Hi Blog. About to jump on my bicycle again for a few days and catch the tail-end of the Hokkaido summer, but here’s a link to a Japan Times article on the Valentine Case, which came out shortly before my last cycle trip.

Japan Times column: “ABUSE, RACISM, LOST EVIDENCE DENY JUSTICE IN VALENTINE CASE: Nigerian’s ordeal shows that different standards apply for foreigners in court” (August 14, 2007).

Column 37 for the Japan Times Community Page
Courtesy http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/fl20070814zg.html
More information and documentation on this case at https://www.debito.org/valentinelawsuit.html

Excerpt:
===============================
In 1999, a Brazilian resident of Japan named Milton Higaki was involved in an accident that killed a schoolgirl. Rather than face justice in Japan, he fled to Brazil fearing “discrimination as a foreigner in Japanese courts.”

Although the domestic media quickly saw this as a case of crooked-foreigner-as-flight-risk, human rights attorney Yasuko Morioka took a more nuanced view, criticizing Japan’s “lack of legal hearings that consider the rights of foreign(ers).”

While fleeing from justice is not to be condoned, cases like Higaki’s are more understandable considering the increasing awareness of the scarier aspects of Japan’s judicial system.

Not only is the United Nations aware of the potential for torture in Japan’s prisons (more below), but courts here also tend to use different judicial standards when coming to decisions in cases involving non-Japanese.

Consider the Valentine case…
===============================

Webbed with links to original sources on Debito.org at https://www.debito.org/japantimes081407.html Original blog report on this case at https://www.debito.org/?p=497

Meanwhile, next Tuesday, August 28 (Wednesday in the provinces) will see my next column coming out in the Japan Times Community Page, on how NJ are being blamed for just about anything these days, and how that adversely affects any possible assimilation.

Enjoy. Arudou Debito in Sapporo

レポート:イドゥボ逮捕と物的証拠なき半年拘留事件

mytest

 皆様こんにちは。Debito.orgの有道 出人です。たいへんご無沙汰しております。

 猛暑日のなか、この事件を申し上げることは恐縮ですが、報告を送信します。これは物的証拠がなくても拘留して迅速な裁判にしてもらう権利を問う事件です。

イドゥボ・オサユワメン,準強姦被告事件
iduborphotocrop1.jpg
 2007年1月22日、本日からちょうど7ヶ月前、横浜市で飲食店を経営しているナイジリア国籍のイドゥボ氏は加賀町警察に逮捕されました。容疑は、2006年11月1日に当飲食店にて酩酊している日本人女性が彼にレイプされたという訴えでした。イドゥボの弁護士津留崎基行(つるさきもとゆき)によると、「平成19年1月22日に準強姦罪で逮捕され,平成19年2月9日に準強姦罪で起訴されました。上記逮捕とそれに引き続く拘留により平成19年5月11日まで加賀町警察署に留置されていましたが,同日,横浜拘置支所に移監になり,現在も同所において留置されています。当職は,平成19年5月21日付けで保釈の請求をいたしましたが,却下されました。」物的証拠がないというものの、イドゥボ氏は未だに拘留されている。筋によると、一つの理由は外国人容疑者の場合、「海外に逃亡する可能性がある」と刑事裁判官が思われているかもしれません。

 アムネスティ・インタナショナルからの紹介で、私はイドゥボ氏の妻(ポランド国籍)から連絡をいただき、彼女は彼の健康状態について大変心配しております。半年以上拘留された結果、彼の頭皮に蕁麻疹が発生し脱毛となり、耳からも血が出ています。にもかかわらず、適切な看病や病院へのアクセスが拒否されているようです。

 (実は、これはバレンタイン裁判と同様です。03年、ナイジリア出身のバレンタイン氏は警察に足が折られたと主張したものの、警察署は10日間の留置で適切な医療行為を拒否して、保釈した本人は現在に至り有害者となりました。損害賠償を要請したバレンタイン氏は東京地裁に今年3月に却下され、現在控訴中。高裁判決全文、警察署の陳述と私が書いたジャパンタイムズの記事はhttps://www.debito.org/valentinelawsuit.html。ちなみに、国連の反拷問委員会が本年5月に発行した日本に対する留置中の「拷問に等しい待遇」についての批判はhttps://www.debito.org/?p=415)

 イドゥボ氏の弁護士からのメモを全文転送させていただきます。問い合わせ、ご取材などをどうぞ津留崎弁護士に直接ご連絡下さい。次回の裁判期日は9月3日(月)14:30〜午後5時です。宜しくお願い致します。有道 出人

////////////////////////////////

〒231-0011
神奈川県横浜市中区太田町1-20三和ビル4A
つるさき法律事務所   弁護士 津留_ 基行
TEL:045-663-6874 / FAX:045-663-6895
email: tsurusaki AT tsuruhou DOT com

被告人イドゥボ・オサユワメン,準強姦被告事件の不合理な点

1 裁判で争われている公訴事実
 平成18年11月1日午前6時30分ころから同日午前9時30分ころまでの間に,飲食店店長であった被告人が,酩酊して抵抗不能な状態になっている客の女性を姦淫したというもの(準強姦)。

2 証拠の概況
 かかる強姦の事実があったことを示す物的な証拠は全くないと言っても過言ではなく,被害者の女性の供述がほぼ唯一の証拠となっている。

 もちろん,被告人は強姦の事実は否定しており,姦淫の事実すらないと述べている。

 ところが,被害者の女性の供述は以下の通り極めて不合理な点が多い。

3 被害者女性による供述の不合理な点
 被害者女性は複数の供述調書を残し,かつ公判廷でも証人として証言したが,供述する度に供述内容が変遷しており一貫していない。

 例えば,被害者女性は店の中でテキーラの一気飲みを3回したと供述しているが,最初の1杯を飲んだときに酔いが回って店の中で寝てしまったと供述したこともあれば,3回目に飲むまでは酔っていなかったと供述していることもある。また,レイプされている最中,自分の顔の上に被告人の顔があったと供述したこともあれば,被告人の顔は見えなかったと供述していることもある。

 また,被害者女性の供述は,客観的証拠とも合致していない点がある。

 例えば,被害者女性は被害に遭った後,パンティーに血がにじんでいたと供述しているが,証拠として提出されているパンティーの写真には血は付着していない。また,被害者女性は被告人に店舗の床の上で引きずられたと供述しているが,証拠として提出されている着衣の写真は全く汚れていない。

 その他,被害者の供述は,その供述内容自体が不自然である点が多い。

 例えば,被害者は,強姦の際に抵抗できないほど酔っていたと供述しながら,その直後に床上を這って店舗の入り口付近まで進んだと述べ,また,這って動くくらいかできないはずであるのに,その場所で足も届かないような高い椅子に自ら腰掛けたと述べ,そのようにする力があるにもかかわらず施錠もされていない店舗の外に逃げようともしていない。

 また,強姦の被害に遭った後,強姦した犯人であるはずの被告人の運転する車で友人宅まで送ってもらったと被害者は供述しているが,この点も通常は信じがたいところである。

 また,強姦の様子についても,その所要時間は1,2分程度で,犯人は射精もせずに自発的に姦淫行為を中断したと被害者が供述している点についても,通常は信じがたいところである。

 強姦被害に遭った当日の行動についても,被害者は当日の朝に抵抗できないほど酔った状態で強姦の被害に遭ったと供述しているにもかかわらず,同日の昼には友人の彼氏と2人でレストランに行って食事をとったと供述しており,強姦被害者の行動としては不自然といわざるを得ない。

 以上指摘した他にも,被害者の供述の中には,多数の不合理な点が含まれている。

4 弁護人の考え
 本件に関する証拠を吟味し,被告人との面会を重ねてきた弁護人は,被告人が本件について完全に無罪であることを確信している。

 そこで,是非とも無罪判決を勝ち取りたいと切望している。

5 要請事項
 時折,ニュースにおいて,真実は無実であるにもかかわらず有罪判決を受け,それが後に無罪であることが判明したという事件が報じられることがあるが,このようなケースは氷山の一角である。

 日本の刑事裁判の実態としては,起訴されれば99.9%有罪判決が出されるのが現状であり,どんなに弁護人が無罪を確信し,弁護活動をしたとしてもなかなか無罪判決が出されることはない。

 刑事裁判官の側に立てば,別の見方もありうるが,上のような現状認識が刑事弁護に携わっている多くの弁護士の共通認識であろうと思われる。

 とはいえ,このような現状を打破し,刑事裁判の結果を左右させるために,直接的に担当裁判所に対して政治的な圧力をかけるような行為は,裁判の公正を害する行為であるから慎まなければならない。

 有効なことは,公正な裁判が実現されるのかどうかを多くの人々が見守っているという事実を裁判所に何らかの形で知ってもらうことである。そのような監視の目があることを裁判所が認識すれば,公正な裁判を実現するために裁判所としては拙速を避けて慎重な審理を心がける可能性がある。

 例えば,裁判の傍聴は広く認められた権利であることから,多くの人達が裁判を傍聴することになれば,それによって裁判所も監視の目があることを意識するものと考えられる。

 もしも,次回の裁判期日(平成19年9月3日(月)14:30〜午後5時)に多くの傍聴希望者がいるとすれば,できる限り多くの傍聴人が裁判を傍聴できるように,広い法廷に変更してもらったり,傍聴人用の補助椅子を用意してもらうなどの要求を当職から裁判所に伝えたいと考えている。

平成19年7月6日
以上

Valentine Lawsuit: NPA denies medical treatment to suspect, Tokyo Dist. Court rules testimony invalid due to witness being African

mytest

“WE CAN’T TRUST THE TESTIMONY OF BLACK PEOPLE”
ANOTHER CASE OF JUDICIAL MISCARRIAGE
A NIGERIAN INJURED AND DETAINED IN J POLICE CUSTODY
LOSES HIS LAWSUIT AGAINST THE NATIONAL POLICE AGENCY

Report by ARUDOU Debito, Sapporo, Japan
debito@debito.org, https://www.debito.org
Freely forwardable
Released July 15, 2007

Japan Times Community Page article, August 14, 2007, on this case, entitled “Abuse, racism, lost evidence deny justice in Valentine Case”, available here.

This post is organized thusly:
SUMMARY
WHY THIS CASE MATTERS TO DEBITO.ORG
FACTS AND ASSERTIONS OF THE CASE
CONCLUSIONS

////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
SUMMARY: According to court records, on December 9, 2003, UC Valentine, a Nigerian citizen working in Kabukicho, Shinjuku, Tokyo, was questioned by plain-clothes police on suspicion of violating laws forbidding the distribution of hand-held billets to passersby. Eventually a scuffle ensued in a narrow alley, where a melee of police and touts wound up with an injured Valentine being pinned to the ground by several police. Plaintiff Valentine claims that he was assaulted while being restrained, by a cop who repeatedly kicked Valentine’s leg so hard that it broke below the knee. The police claim that Valentine injured himself, running away and crashing knee-first into an elevated bar sign attached to the alley wall. In any case, Valentine was apprehended and interrogated for ten days, denied hospitalization or adequate medical treatment for the interim. Consequently, his leg injury became so medically traumatized that it required complex hospital operations. To this day Valentine remains physically impaired and in constant pain. In 2005, Valentine sued the NPA for damages and hospital bills totaling 42,937,800 yen in Tokyo District Court, but lost his case on March 29, 2007. Inter alia, the court ruled that not only was a doctor’s expert testimony about Plaintiff’s crippling injuries merely “a sense, not based upon rational grounds”, but also that a witness’s testimony was inadmissible because he is African. Clearly there is an emerging pattern of differing standards for non-Japanese claimants in Japanese courts.

The case is currently on appeal in the Tokyo High Court. First hearing on Tuesday, July 17, 2007, Tokyo Koutou Saibansho 8F, Rm 808, 1:30PM. Attend if you want.
////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

Heisei 17 (wa) Dai 17658, Tokyo District Court, Civil Court Dai 44-Bu
Plaintiff: UC VALENTINE
Defendant: Tokyo Municipal Government (Tokyo-to), Governor ISHIHARA Shintaro et al.

Tokyo District Court decision full text in Japanese at
https://www.debito.org/valentinelawsuit.html
NPA’s fishy photo testimony of what happened at
https://www.debito.org/valentinelawsuit.html#NPAtestimony
Plaintiff Valentine’s testimony in English
https://www.debito.org/valentinelawsuit.html#etestimony

////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

WHY THIS CASE MATTERS: Setting aside any “he-said, she-said” doubts about different recall of the facts of the case, both parties agree that Valentine was detained in police custody for ten days without hospitalization. This caused his medical condition to worsen to the point of debilitation. This was not, however, seen by the judiciary as something the police should take any responsibility for.

As far as Debito.org goes, from a judicial standpoint this case is also of great concern due to differing standards for evidence based upon nationality. The judge, when dismissing the case, actually goes so far as to say (page 19) that testimony of a witness for Valentine (who vouches for his version on the police breaking his leg) cannot be trusted because it is “from the Black Community”. To quote:

===============================
“In light of the fact that the witness has been acquainted with the Plaintiff , visiting him in hospital after his leg was broken, and is a friend of quite some closeness, and the fact that they associated with each other within the Black Community in Kabukichou, witness Francis’s testimony as an eyewitness account is not something we can see as having objectivity, and as such cannot possibly believe.”

“shounin wa, juuzen kara genkoku to menshiki ga ari, honken kossetsu go mo genkoku o byouin wo mimatteiru nado kanari shitashii koto ga ukagatteiru yuujin de ari, kabukichou no kokujin no komyunitei no nakama de atta koto tou o terasu to, shounin Furanshisu no kyoujutsu wa, mokugeki shougen to shite kyakkansei o yuusuru mono to wa iezu, kono mama shinyou suru toutei dekinai”
https://www.debito.org/valentinelawsuit.html#19
===============================

Hm, try disqualifying a person’s testimony because he’s a member of a Black Community (not to mention because he is a friend who visits the Plaintiff in hospital), and see how that gets you in the judiciary of most of the world’s other developed countries. Moreover, the accounts of other police officers are not similarly called into doubt for having too much closeness in their own “community”.

I’ve seen this sort of thing before. Check out the cracked judge in the McGowan Case of 2006, where the Plaintiff (an African-American) was refused entry by an eyeglass shop expressly because the shopkeep “hates black people”. There, Osaka District Court Judge Saga Yoshifumi ruled against the gaijin there too. Inter alia, McGowan and his Japanese wife’s eyewitness accounts were deemed insufficient due to an alleged language barrier. Full details on that case (starting with a Japan Times article) at
https://www.debito.org/mcgowanhanketsu.html#japantimesfeb7

In this case, presiding Judge Sugiyama et al go one better, and say that because they are black they are thick as thieves…

It’s one of the reasons we are seeing cases of suspects escaping overseas because they believe they’re going to get a raw deal in a Japanese court due to their foreignness.
https://www.debito.org/?p=361

I have no sympathy for wanted criminals, of course, but neither the McGowan nor the Valentine Cases are criminal cases. And still they got raw deals–court defeats. Due to a different set of judicial standards applied to foreigners than to Japanese. Adding these cases to the collection.

////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

FACTS AND ASSERTIONS OF THE CASE
(based upon the court decision and with Valentine’s claims)

On December 9, 2003, UC Valentine (born 1972 and married to a Japanese from 2002) was working his shift as a show club distributing pamphlets to potential clients. In the early evening, he was approached by two plain-clothes officers who appeared to Valentine to be customers (Valentine asserts that they did not identify themselves as police until a melee ensued).

Minutes later, in a narrow alleyway close to the show club, other members of the Black Community shouted repeatedly to Valentine, “Leave them!”, apparently aware that they were either police or yakuza. What happens next depends on the side of the courtroom you’re sitting, but in any case, due either to panic (Valentine) or guilt (police), Valentine fled, then found himself being restrained by three cops on the ground in the alleyway. He was arrested on suspicion of violating the Entertainment and Amusement Trades Control Act (Fuueihou) Art. 22 Sec. 1 for distributing nightlife pamphlets on the street.

Somewhere in this scuffle Valentine’s right leg was broken below the knee. Valentine’s version (as was his eyewitness’s, unfortunately Black) is that a police officer named Tanabu kicked him several times in the knee, even while the former was being restrained by two other cops. The cops say (in photo-reenacted evidence shown to me in person by Valentine and his wife on April 26, 2007, and scanned at Debito.org at https://www.debito.org/valentinelawsuit.html#kneebash) that when Valentine fled, he crashed into a metal sign (jutting out in a triangle from the wall) knee first, breaking his leg.

valentineNPAreport004.jpg
valentineNPAreport0052.jpg

What’s fishy about this story is when you look at the photograph, the sign is actually on a wall 23 cms high, with a sidewalk below it showing a raised curb and two steps. Valentine was nimble enough to avoid tripping over three steps, but somehow not nimble enough to avoid the sign. When you consider that this happened on a December 9 around 8PM, when the sign is likely to be lit and the steps in shadow, it is odd that the more visible object is the thing Valentine allegedly crashed into.

Also odd is that if he crashed into the sign knee-first, it should have broken his knee, not the bone below his knee. However, the police apparently confiscated Valentine’s pants for analysis, and after some time finally returned them with no report on whether or not there were traces of footprint.

Valentine was held in police custody between December 9 and 19, 2003, and, despite being put into a cast, given no access to a hospital. According to his testimony (https://www.debito.org/valentinelawsuit.html#etestimony), he claims that police interrogation involved quid pro quos–access to painkillers and his wife in exchange for signing documents, one a statement stating inter alia that the police did not injure him. On Day 10 of his interrogation, once the clause about injury was eliminated, Valentine signed and was turned over to Immigration, who called an ambulance and hospitalized him at Ebara Byouin, Tokyo, immediately. His leg was apparently busted up so badly (a case the doctor who treated him, whose testimony was entered into the court record (page 17 (i)), said he had never seen the likes of before) that it required rib bone transferal to the area at great time and expense.

Situations like these in Japanese custody have come under fire in 2007 by the United Nations Committee Against Torture. See
https://www.debito.org/?p=494

////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

WHY THE COURT REJECTED VALENTINE’S SUIT

In addition to dismissing the eyewitness testimony due to being members of the wrong ethnic community, the decision makes two singularly interesting points, also indicative of this court’s odd standards of evidence:

1) In order for a foreigner to sue the State of Japan, the foreigner’s home country laws must also cover a Japanese in the same situation in that country (page 13 3.1 (1)). I’m not a lawyer, but I would have thought that Japan’s laws apply to everyone equally, including foreign residents, regardless of their country of origin. Fortunately, the judges rule that Valentine’s Nigerian citizenship does not void his ability to sue the State.

2) Despite acknowledging the expertise of Valentine’s examining doctor at Ebara Byouin, the judges dismiss their medical testimony as merely “a sense” (kankaku teki), not “rational grounds” (gouriteki na konkyou–page 17 (i)). The judges even decide (in their somehow professional medical opinion, on page 15 u (a)) that Valentine’s leg didn’t get that much worse while in custody. Then they even judge on their own recognizance (page 16 item e) that Valentine’s bones are strong–so he must have run into that sign pretty hard to hurt himself. After all, shoes, they say, inflict “pinpoint injuries”, and Tanabu’s “rubber shoes” wouldn’t cause the injuries that Valentine suffered (page 16 a (a)). Shoes are apparently incapable of stomping from the heel, I guess.

////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

CONCLUSIONS

There are other fine points, such as who did what to whom with what, and whether people were running slow or fast, but never mind. The point still remains that Valentine was crippled due to a sustained lack of medical attention, and what kept him from that were the Kabukichou Police.

The responsibility for this is not discussed adequately in the decision (judges assert that an X-ray, a cast, disinfection, and draining blood from the joints performed on the first day of incarceration were somehow medically sufficient (page 22 3 (1) i (a) onwards)–even were the best that could be done in a non-life-threatening situation given the fact that he was in custody. Therefore nothing illegal happened. Regardless of the fact that Valentine still wound up crippled, for reasons his doctor says was due to prolonged medical inattention.

Even if Valentine had not been crippled by the police (instead, say, stabbed in the leg by a criminal), would these dangerously temporary measures still be legal? Quite probably. Which means the NPA’s clear negligence for the welfare of the incarcerated, plus the judiciary’s unwillingness to force them to take responsibility when something goes wrong, is damning evidence of the unaccountability within Japan’s criminal justice system.

Couple that with a court willing to use any pretext possible to discount the victim’s standpoint, including overruling doctors and dismissing testimony by nationality, and you have a police force which, increasingly clearly, can deal with foreigners any way they like with impunity.

Arudou Debito
Sapporo, Japan
debito@debito.org
https://www.debito.org
July 15, 2007
REPORT ON VALENTINE LAWSUIT ENDS

Anti-money laundering measures snag tourists with traveller’s checks

mytest

Hi Blog. I cited Terrie’s Take this morning (see previous post on this blog) about Japan’s half-assed campaign to boost tourism in Japan. Was going to wait until tomorrow to put the following up, but a friend expressed an interest in Japan’s anti-money-laundering policies so tonight:

Debito.org’s been cc-ed in a number of interesting correspondences from complete strangers (thanks), with the following moral:

More phooey on Japan’s vaunted YOKOSO JAPAN campaign: tourists who need to cover a midsize a sum as thousand USD in costs (see letter from University of Kentucky’s Prof. Stradford below) are suspected of being money launderers (meaning Japanese banks will sell large demoninations of travellers’ checks, but then will not cash them unless you have a permanent address in Japan).

Long history of this. I’ve been snagged as far back as 2003 for suspicion of money laundering–for receiving as little as 5000 yen (as a donation) from overseas. Friend Olaf (a Permanent Resident) has been told to display his passport (not required of Japanese) for wanting to change a small sum of leftover USD to JPY. More on the Mission Impossible of getting better service from Japanese banks as a NJ here.

The good news is that Japanese authorities actually responded (and in a timely manner) to Professor Stradford’s inquiries. Good. Not sure if it resolves the situation any (travellers’ checks of that denomination are still just as useless), but at least someone tried to help.

I’ll promote this post to an “anti-discrimination template”–as it demonstrates that it does pay to complain when policies are idiotic. Here’s hoping things go smoothly for Prof. Stradford’s contributions to the Japanese economy. Arudou Debito in Sapporo

//////////////////////////////////////////////
From: stradfot@XXXX.edu
Subject: Travelers check problems that have begun in Japan
Date: July 6, 2007 3:58:17 PM JST
To: visitjapan@jntonyc.org;, info@jnto-lax.org, vjc@poem.ocn.ne.jp
Cc: debito@debito.org

Dear Sir,

Since the Yurakucho Office does not have an email address, I have to begin by sending a complaint on ‘the use of travelers checks in Japan’ to your offices, which are associated with the “Yokoso Japan” and “Visit Japan” campaigns.

Since the 1980s, the University of Kentucky has taken groups of 3 to 6 students to Japan each summer. We stay at hostels, business hotels, and yado which usually do not take credit cards in order to keep their costs low. However, this requires that we cash large amounts of cash to pay the hotel bills for 4 to 7 people, especially to cover weekend periods when banks and post offices are closed.

During this summer’s trip, I was unable to cash $1000 or two $500 travelers checks at a bank in a single day, as the banks have set a Y100,000 limit on cashing travelers checks in Japan. I was shown the new requirement that all banks were to observe this limitation beginning 1 January 2007. This is very strange as these same banks ‘sell’ $1000 denomination travelers checks to Japanese to use outside Japan. The only way to cash these checks was to show proof that you had a permanent address in Japan. What Japanese person or foreigner needs to use travelers checks in Japan? This is an indirect form of discrimination against foreign tourists, who are now considered untrustworthy to use large travelers checks. Luckily, on this trip I was able to find business people willing to take time out of their day to cash the checks for me at the banks and then give me the money.

Besides this insult, future trips in the summer are now under review to cancel, as there is no way that banks can be sought out everyday to cash small amounts, especially on weekends, or in places where banks and post offices do not exist, such as in Yasumiya on Towada-ko, or at Lake Toya, both places that we have stopped in the past.

We cannot raise the cost for the students just to stay in credit card hotels, and we are not going to limit our trip to only Tokyo and Kyoto, where at least the airport banks seem to disregard this new requirement.

If we cannot get enough cash to pay for hotels for 4-7 people over a weekend, then we will stop this trip.

Thanks for looking into this problem.

H. Todd Stradford
Associate Professor
University of Wisconsin Platteville
Platteville, WI 53818
Phone: 608.342.1674
Fax: 608.342.1088
http://www.uwplatt.edu/geography/japan
/////////////////////////////////////////////////

ANSWER FROM THE AUTHORITIES:

/////////////////////////////////////////////////
From: XXXXXXX@jnto-lax.org
Subject: Re: Travelers check problems that have begun in Japan
Date: July 7, 2007 10:48:08 AM JST
To: stradfot@XXXXXX
Cc: visitjapan@jntonyc.org, info@jnto-lax.org, vjc@poem.ocn.ne.jp, debito@debito.org

Dear H. Todd Stradford,

Thank you very much for your email. We did not know that this problem existed until you let us know today. First of all, I’m very sorry that this happened and that you had to waste time looking for business people to cash the travelers checks.

It is true that there was a law passed on January 4, 2007 that requires banks to confirm the identity of anyone (Japanese or non) making a deposit or money transfer of 100,000 yen or more. The same law has been passed in many other countries with the aim of preventing money laundering and the funding of terrorism. When I looked through the laws on the FSA website (http://www.fsa.go.jp/policy/honninkakunin/), it seems that you may have been treated unfairly, but I do not fully understand the laws myself so I will contact our headquarters and have them look into this further.

Please let me know the names of the banks that would not change your travelers checks for you (as much as you remember, city and branch name if possible).

Rest assured that we take your claim seriously, and will follow through until you get a satisfactory answer.

Best regards,
Christopher Bishop
********************************
Japan National Tourist Organization
515 South Figueroa Street, Suite 1470
Los Angeles, CA 90071
TEL: 213-623-1952
FAX: 213-623-6301
http://www.japantravelinfo.com
http://www.jnto.go.jp
********************************
ENDS

/////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

From: xxxxxxx@jntonyc.org
Subject: Re: Travelers check problems that have begun in Japan
Date: July 11, 2007 12:09:30 AM JST
To: stradfot@XXXXXXXXXX
Cc: visitjapan@jntonyc.org, info@jnto-lax.org, vjc@poem.ocn.ne.jp, debito@debito.org, XXXXXX@jntonyc.org, XXXXXXX@jntonyc.org, XXXXXXX@jntonyc.org

Dear Professor Stradford,

We are very sorry to hear your frustration regarding the lack of email access to Yurakucho’s office and the Japanese banking system. As you may know, Japan is still a very cash oriented nation. It may be more efficient to take advantage of ATM services. Starting July 11, 2007 Seven (Eleven) banks will provide ATM services. Seven Eleven convenient stores are located widely across Japan and this hopefully will aid you and your colleagues to retrieve cash. One can take out as much as 500,000yen per day. Please go to our website for more detailed information: http://www.japantravelinfo.com/news/news_item.php?newsid=33. We hope this information can help you. We are sorry for all the inconveniences caused regarding your travelers’ checks. Moreover, we hope that you can still send 4-7 people to Japan. Please do not hesitate to contact me at any point in time if you have any further concerns.

Kind regards,

Takae Ishizuka
Web & Marketing Specialist
Japan National Tourist Organization – JNTO
One Rockefeller Plaza, Suite 1250
New York, New York 10020

Tel: (212) 757-5641 Ext. 20
Fax: (212) 307-6754
“The East of Ordinary”
www.JapanTravelinfo.com
ENDS

Yomiuri: Nikkei Brazilian cannot be probation officer due to Nationality Clause

mytest

Hi Blog. Justice Ministry exercising its typical administrative guidance–in this case making sure foreigners never exercise any power over Japanese. That includes NJ helping police their own, I guess. Just can’t trust NJ, no longer how long they’ve been here (below, the person denied a volunteer job has been in Japan sixteen years).

Case cites the Nationality Clause and the Chong Hyang Gyun Lawsuit defeat. Even though many local governments are now abolishing their Nationality Clause requirements. Just goes to show how closed-minded the MOJ is determined to be, even if it means they remove one means to deal with NJ/youth crime (which it has no problems citing as a scourge). Breathtaking bureaucratic foresight. Debito in Sapporo

===========================================

Ministry: Brazilian can’t be probation officer
The Yomiuri Shimbun July 8, 2007

http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/dy/national/20070708TDY02008.htm
Courtesy of FG

SHIZUOKA–The Shizuoka Probation Office has given up its bid to appoint a second-generation Brazilian of Japanese descent as a probation officer after it received a Justice Ministry opinion indicating that foreigners may not be commissioned to exercise public authority, according to sources.

Probation officers are part-time, unpaid central government officials entrusted by the justice minister. The ministry said it is “problematic” to commission foreign residents as probation officers because some of their responsibilities involve exercising public authority.

About 50,000 Brazilian of Japanese descent live in Shizuoka Prefecture, mainly in its western part, where the manufacturing industry is prosperous, comprising one-sixth of the total figure of such foreigners in the country.

Among the cities in the prefecture, Hamamatsu is home to 20,000 Brazilians of Japanese descent–the nation’s largest number–and delinquency by Brazilian youth has become a problem.

Language barriers pose a hurdle when it comes to support the rehabilitation of delinquent young Brazilians.

In an attempt to tackle the problem, the Shizuoka Probation Office in April asked karate school operator Tetsuyoshi Kodama, a second-generation Brazilian of Japanese descent who is experienced in dealing with non-Japanese youths, to become a probation officer.

Kodama, 41, who moved to Shizuoka from Brazil 16 years ago, agreed, saying he wanted to contribute to the rehabilitation of Brazilian youths. He said he thought he could do this by approaching them in a different way than Japanese would tend to do.

But when the probation office contacted the Justice Ministry’s Rehabilitation Bureau to get approval for Kodama’s appointment, the ministry rejected the idea, saying it would be problematic to offer the post of probation officer to a foreigner because the exercising of public authority would be involved in cases such as when a probation officer informs the chief of the probation office if a youth breaks a promise with a probation officer, which could result in the chief applying for parole to be canceled.

According to the ministry’s Rehabilitation Bureau, it provided the opinion based on the opinion of the Cabinet Legislation Bureau in which Japanese citizenship is required for public servants who exercise public authority and make decisions that affect the public.

In January 2005, the Supreme Court gave a similar viewpoint in a lawsuit filed over the Tokyo metropolitan government’s refusal to let a foreigner take management position tests.

As for the qualifications required for a person to serve as a probation officer, however, there are no judicial precedents. An official at the ministry’s bureau said he had never heard discussions on whether to appoint a person without Japanese citizenship to a probation officer post.

According to the Shizuoka Probation Office, many foreign youths who are put on probation cannot speak Japanese. Probation officers have to communicate with them with the help of interpreters or their friends and family members.

Masataka Inomata, head of the Shizuoka Federation of Volunteer Probation Officers Associations, said: “Besides myself, there’s only one other probation officer who can speak Portuguese in the prefecture. It’s difficult to build trust with youths through a third party.”

(Jul. 8, 2007)
ENDS

読売:日系ブラジル人の保護司登用、法務省の「困難」見解で断念

mytest

日系ブラジル人の保護司登用、法務省の「困難」見解で断念
7月6日19時28分配信 読売新聞
http://headlines.yahoo.co.jp/hl?a=20070706-00000307-yom-soci

 静岡保護観察所(静岡市葵区)が、浜松市内の日系ブラジル人男性を保護司として推薦することを法務省に打診したところ、「保護司の業務は公権力の行使にあたり、外国人に委嘱することは困難」との見解を示され、推薦を断念していたことが6日、わかった。

 在日ブラジル人が多い同市などでは、ブラジル人非行少年らの更生支援にあたって、言葉の壁の問題が指摘されているが、こうした現場の要請に応えられない形となり、論議を呼びそうだ。

 静岡県内には、製造業が盛んな県西部を中心に、在日ブラジル人の6分の1の約5万人が暮らしている。特に浜松市には全国最多の約2万人が住み、ブラジル人少年による非行や犯罪も相次いでいる。
最終更新:7月6日19時28分

========================
コメント:ブラジル人非行少年を対処するために、上記の外国人ボランティアもこうやって拒否してもいいでしょうか。この日系外国人は日本に16年間も住んでいる(この記事に載っていないが、英語のバージョンをどうぞ)し、社会問題にも自分の技量を役立たせたいのですが、それでも当局は信用ができないですか。非行を認めて、効果的な対処法を認めず、どういうことでしょうか。
ends

“Beware of foreigners” leaflets in Ikuno-ku, Osaka

mytest

Hi Blog. This has come up on The Community Mailing List:

Jon writes:
============================
A friend of mine found this on a car in Ikunoku and said there were plenty of them around. Anyone in Osaka want to help me do something about this?
http://img294.imageshack.us/my.php?image=img2007jun26ih4.jpg
ikutakukeisatsuJune07.jpg

(NB: For those who find the flyer hard to read:
HELP US STOP ILLEGAL LABOR AND FOREIGN OVERSTAYERS!
(Images of Illegal overstayers, long-nosed fraudulent grooms, passport forgers, and illegal workers: All including blondies, of course.)
THESE DAYS WHERE FOREIGN CRIME IS RISING FAST [Even though, according to the Mainichi Feb 07, it’s dropping. So is, according to Immigration, foreign overstaying.]
CHECK THE STATUS OF RESIDENCE AND PERIOD OF STAY ON THEIR PASSPORTS, TO ENSURE YOU EMPLOY A FOREIGNER PROPERLY!!
THERE WILL BE PENALITIES FOR EMPLOYERS WHO EMPLOY FOREIGNERS NOT PERMITTED TO WORK, AS WELL AS THOSE WHO ACT AS INTERMEDIARIES.
WE ASK YOU TO COOPERATE IN ORDER TO GIVE US A SAFE AND LIVABLE TOWN ENVIRONMENT WITHIN IKUNO-KU.
IKUNO SANGYOU ROUDOUSHA KOKUSAIKA TAISAKU RENRAKU KYOUGIKAI
OSAKA FU IKUNO POLICE STATION, CONTACT 06-6712-1234)

I found at http://www.ikuno.or.jp/1_1.htm that this flyer is being distributed by the Ikuno Sangyoukai.
名称 社団法人 生野産業会
会長 三宅 一嘉
所在地 〒544-0004 大阪市生野区巽北1丁目21番23号
電話番号 06-6757-2551
FAX番号 06-6754-2186
============================

Declan adds:
============================
For what it is worth, practically every chamber of commerce in the
country had meetings this month with regards to foreign employees.

My chamber held a meeting June 8th
http://www.okazakicci.or.jp/goma/68foreigner.pdf

I didn’t attend because I was overseas at the time, but as far as I know
there were no harebrained schemes for leafletting cars on the streets.

I don’t see any point in counter leaflets. Perhaps a better approach
might just be to write a letter to the sangyoukai asking for them to
refrain from littering, and to suggest that instead of distributing
leaflets, that they ensure that all of the companies in their membership
are in fact checking the bona fides of any foreigners in their employment,
and that the hotels/accommodation sector of their membership
aren’t demanding passport copies from Japan residents etc. Something
conciliatory and practical is usually the best way to start a dialogue.
============================

Dave suggests:
============================
The clear first step in doing anything about this is to call the number
on the leaflet and get some information.

The main information to get is to find out who exactly within the
chamber of commerce is the project leader for this, who is their public
representative, and that sort of thing.

Then, if possible, initiate a meeting or a phone call where the matter
can be formally discussed. Find out why they are doing this now, what
their concerns are, how this all came about.

During that meeting or phone call, see if you can point out where
they’ve given into fears and departed from facts, and see how much they
can be swayed.

At all steps, record the conversations.

Whether or not anything further can or should be done will be very clear
once all those kinds of facts are in.

You’d be surprised at how far some dialogue can go. A lot of the people
behind these things aren’t deliberately rejecting facts about foreign
crime, they’re just blissfully ignorant. A polite discussion with a
foreigner who has his facts straight can make a big impression.

The ideal candidate for this task is someone who can communicate well in
Japanese and can be in Osaka to really talk to these people.
============================

Readers of Debito.org who would like to try their hand at a little activism are encouraged to investigate this further. Tell us how things go in the Comments section of this Blog? Debito in Sapporo

ANDREW SMALLACOMBE AT THE COMMUNITY ADDS:

============================
I know this will probably sound obvious, butsome of my concerns
regarding the leaflets are:

– They are directed at employers. Passport forgery and bogus
marriages, while illegal, are not something a potential employer can
or should police. Any revised posters should not mention the other
two offenses at all. They should merely remind employers that hiring
foreign workers with inappropriate visa status is illegal and to
check this status.

– The caricatures are racist and would be more appropriate in World
War II propeganda. It also implies that all foreign nationals are
physically distinguishable from the Japanese poplulation, and
furthermore hints that those with illegal status are readily
identifiable. Lose them in any reprints.

-Again, as the leaflets are aimed at employers, statements
of “rapidly rising foreigner crime” are irrelevant, not to mention
highly questionable. Lose them.

Essentially, if it is necessary to alert businesses to the fact that
hiring foreign workers without the correct visa status is a criminal
act, fine. Just don’t try to use perceptions of crime by foreign
nationals as justification.
============================
ENDS

UPDATE JULY 6: THERE HAS BEEN MOVEMENT ON THIS ISSUE, SEE COMMENTS SECTION FOR UPDATES…

JULY 8: FOOD FOR THOUGHT, SENT TO ME BY M.D.:
perspective.jpg

DEBITO.ORG IN NO WAY SUPPORTS THE IMAGES BEING DISPLAYED ABOVE, BUT FEELS IT IS A USEFUL EXERCISE TO PUT THE SHOE ON THE OTHER FOOT. DO YOU THINK THE GOJ WOULD SIT IDLY BY IF THESE IMAGES WERE BEING PUT OUT BY POLICE FORCES IN OTHER COUNTRIES?

Asahi: Shizuoka Pref residents block Brazilian from buying land

mytest

Hi Blog. Another one of these “get a load of this” situations…

A local residents’ association, citing fears of crime and foreigners fleeing the country after committing them, worked together to block a realtor from doing his job as intermediary for a house purchase by a 3rd-generation Nikkei Brazilian man in the (appropriately named) Nagamizo area of Iwata City, Shizuoka.

The MOJ’s Bureau of Human Rights as usual showed its ineffectuality by saying the NJ purchaser was in the right, even had his human rights violated, but had no way to set things right with any enforcement mechanisms. (See another example of this BOHR ineffectuality on Debito.org)

So the residents kick him out, and continue to man the barricades against any more foreigners. Nice work. Wonder what would happen if this happened to Japanese in other countries? The Japanese press would have a field day vilifying the town and making the excluded Japanese into victims, the GOJ MOFA would lodge formal complaints, tourism from Japan there would decrease… is not too much a stretch of the imagination. The shoe’s never on the other foot here, it seems. Debito in Sapporo

////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
Racism surfaces over bid by foreigner to buy land, settle
06/29/2007 THE ASAHI SHIMBUN

http://www.asahi.com/english/Herald-asahi/TKY200706290148.html

FUKUROI, Shizuoka Prefecture– Fearful that they would be inviting crime to their neighborhood, residents blocked an attempt by a Japanese-Brazilian man to buy land on which to build a house.

The local regional legal affairs bureau said their actions constituted a “violation of human rights” and told the parties involved that if a similar situation occurred in the future they should handle it better.

In the end, the man was forced to purchase property elsewhere.

The 30-year-old factory worker had his heart set on purchasing a 200-square-meter plot through a realtor in the nearby city of Iwata in April last year, said sources familiar with the matter.

The third-generation Japanese-Brazilian had planned to build a detached house on the plot in the Nagamizo district of Fukuroi.

But before he could sign the contract, a group of local residents who are members of the Nagamizo community association raised objections to the purchase after they learned from the realtor that the buyer was of Brazilian ancestry.

The group, which at the time comprised 12 households, notified the real estate company of its intention to stop the man from moving in, the sources said.

One resident, citing a perception that Brazilians are prone to committing crimes, said, “I feared that something might happen.” The woman alluded to a number of reports about Brazilians fleeing Japan to avoid prosecution for crimes committed in Japan.

An official with the civil liberties division of the Shizuoka Legal Affairs Bureau, a regional branch of the Justice Ministry, refused to discuss the case, citing the need for confidentiality.

But the official noted that in general the approval of neighborhood residents is not necessary for a real estate transaction.

“As long as the seller and the buyer agree on the terms, the deal goes through, regardless of opposition from local residents,” he said.

In the end, the Japanese-Brazilian was unable to buy the land because the realtor failed to fulfill its obligation to act as an intermediary. The man took his case to the Fukuroi branch of the Shizuoka Legal Affairs Bureau in May last year, contending that a “violation of human rights” had occurred.

The bureau agreed with the man after studying the case and talked to the community association group and the president of the real estate company about ending local opposition to the man’s quest to build a home. The meeting took place some time before June 6 this year, the sources said.

The Shizuoka Legal Affairs Bureau official said that even if the residents and the realtor had committed what the bureau deemed to be a violation of human rights, there were no provisions to punish the parties.

“The bureau’s function is to educate the public about human rights issues by pointing out what constitute violations of human rights,” the official said.

The head of the Nagamizo community association stated bluntly that non-Japanese are not welcome in the neighborhood. “Honestly speaking, we don’t want (Brazilians) to move into the neighborhood if possible,” the person said. “We need to think about how we should deal with similar situations if a Brazilian wants to buy a plot of land here in the future.”

The Japanese-Brazilian acknowledges that the overall image of Brazilians is not good, but he urged people to look at them individually.

“I hold down a job and I am able to speak Japanese,” he said. “Although I had planned to meet those residents in person, I was told ‘not to bother.'”

The man bought a 160-square meter land in a different section of the city and built a house on it.(IHT/Asahi: June 29,2007)
ARTICLE ENDS

Caroline Pover’s T-shirt campaign to find Lindsay Hawker’s murder suspect

mytest

Hi Blog. This just came through. Good idea (Debito.org is doing a similar awareness-raising campaign with JAPANESE ONLY T-shirts.), so passing this along. Debito

//////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

From: caroline@carolinepover.com
Subject: I’m launching a T-shirt campaign for Lindsay Ann Hawker’s family and am asking for your help
Date: June 28, 2007 12:07:11 PM JST
To: caroline@carolinepover.com

Dear Friends & Associates

As you probably know, 22-year-old Lindsay Ann Hawker was teaching English in
Japan when she was brutally murdered at the end of March this year. Tatsuya
Ichihashi remains the Japanese police’s only suspect and has still not been
found.

In support of Lindsay’s family and the Japanese police in their hunt for
this man, I am launching a T-shirt campaign. I hope that enough people – men
and women, Japanese and foreign – will wear this T-shirt so that this man’s
face is seen by as many people as possible in Japan, on a daily basis.

I met with Lindsay’s family yesterday, who said: “The more people that wear
the T-shirts, the more support that we will feel is being shown for us.
Lindsay was a teacher, who loved her life in Japan. She would have been
first in the queue to buy and wear such a T-shirt for another victim. She
had a strong sense of justice, and would have done anything she could have
to have helped others.”

PLEASE play a part in assisting Lindsay’s family in keeping this man’s face
right where people can see it. Buy a t-shirt and wear it at the gym,
dropping the kids off at school, going shopping, on the train, and just
walking around – wear it anywhere you will be seen by many people. If you
don’t live in Japan, why not help by buying shirts for us to give to people
who do?

There are many things you can do to help: buy and wear a T-shirt, buy LOTS
of T-shirts for us to give to people to wear, volunteer to help with the
campaign, get your company involved, and pass on this email to all your
foreign and Japanese friends living in Japan. If you are involved with any
print media, we also have a print campaign you are welcome to use.

On behalf of the Hawker family, thank you very much for your support.

Caroline
———–
To order T-shirts go to http://www.cafepress.com/beingabroad

To volunteer yourself, your company, or media coverage, please email
caroline@carolinepover.com

Please forward this email to your foreign and Japanese friends living in
Japan.


Caroline Pover
President & CEO
Caroline Pover, Inc. & Weekender, Inc.
———————–
Being A Broad http://www.being-a-broad.com
Alexandra Press http://www.alexandrapress.com
Weekender magazine http://www.weekenderjapan.com
———————–
Tel: 03-5549-2038
Fax: 03-5549-2039
Email: caroline@carolinepover.com
Chuo Iikura Bldg 5F, 3-4-11 Azabudai, Minato-ku, Tokyo 106-0041, Japan
ENDS

Traffic Accident: Good experience with police (UPDATED)

mytest

Hi Blog. I use this space enough to heap scorn on the Japanese police (deservedly, mind you). But I thought I’d balance things out a bit with praise where it’s due:

TRAFFIC ACCIDENT IN SAPPORO
TREATED WITH DIGNITY AND EFFICIENCY BY THE POLICE
JUNE 13 TO 15, 2007

I have had a pretty rotten June so far (see what I mean when I spent the past two weeks in Upstate New York battling my demons of the past, and trying to see my abducted daughter), and it was only made worse by the events of June 13.

At 1PM, I was doing my bicycle commute to school from downtown Sapporo (60 kms round trip), cycling on a sidewalk designated for cyclists, when a middle-aged gentleman working for a construction company left the parking lot of Homac department store in Atsubetsu, Sapporo, without looking both ways.

He ploughed into the front tyre of my bicycle (the one I have used for all of my cycletreks these past few years), dragging me and my bicycle for about a meter. My body weight was thrown upon the hood of his car, but my right leg took a sizeable impact below the knee.

He came out of his car immediately to check on me and to apologize. Sliding off his car and standing on my good left leg, I said, okay, let’s get the police involved. I dialed 110 on my keitai, got the Atsubetsu Police, and explained to them the situation. Location, details of the impact, make and license plate of the car, and names.

Some hints, in case you find yourself in this situation:

1) IF YOU ARE THE VICTIM, TAKE CHARGE. NEGOTIATE WITH THE POLICE RIGHT AWAY ON THE PHONE, WHERE THERE IS LESS NONVERBAL BAGGAGE TO DEAL WITH.

2) DO NOT MOVE THE VEHICLES. STAY WHERE YOU ARE AND LET THE POLICE TAKE PHOTOGRAPHS. CHANGING THE POSITIONS DESTROYS EVIDENCE.

3) STAY AS CALM AS POSSIBLE. DON’T SAY YOU’RE SORRY UNLESS YOU ARE WILLING TO TAKE FULL RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE ACCIDENT. LET THE POLICE GATHER THE INFORMATION.

We waited about ten minutes before the traffic police came by, and they talked to me first and got my side of the story. Not once did they ask my nationality (the driver, making conversation, did, not that it bothered me), and once I showed them my driver license and meishi from my university, they were pleasant, even deferential. They treated me like a victim.

Even more luckily, the driver of the car was a decent sort, and claimed full responsibility and fault. The driver and I were cordial, cross-checking our stories, while the police took our stories separately. Our memories jibed, so the investigation was completed in about ten minutes. The police took their pictures, chalked the positions of the vehicles and had them moved, and confirmed their interpretations of the events (based upon the evidence at hand) with our recollections (police in Japan try to find fault with both parties, so they asked if I was cycling fast or recklessly, which I wasn’t; the driver concurred, and reiterated that he was completely to blame).

The police advised me to go to a hospital immediately for some X-rays (I had class, had to wait until today), then said we could go.

I locked my ruined bike (the front tyre was completely collapsed and bowed inward, the front fork bent, and even the back tyre was askew–I have the feeling the driver confused his accelerator with his brake) to a nearby fence, limped to the driver’s car, and got a lift to school. He even said if my bike was irreparable (which it probably is), I should not hesitate to get a new one.

=================================

The driver’s insurance company was on the phone to me within hours, getting my particulars and side of the story. (The agent did ask about my nationality, and I said Japanese. When he asked my previous nationality, I told him it was irrelevant. He dropped the subject.) He was trying to get an estimate of my bike’s worth, which I said I could not assess. I told him that I wanted my bike the same as it was before, at no cost to me. I would retreive the bike later that evening and deliver it to my favorite bike shop in Makomanai for a repairs estimate, I said. He said keep track of my auto mileage for compensation for my fuel costs. I gave him the bike shop’s number and let them negotiate things out.

I went to the hospital today (one I chose; the insurance agent called ahead and made an appointment for me; they would cover all my bills) for several X-rays of my right leg. They turned up negative for any severe damage (some possible bleeding in the bone, but no edema). Should be healed in a couple of weeks, but it’s difficult for me to walk normally and climb stairs at the moment. The hospital would be sending the insurance agency news on the doctor’s findings.

I then took the doctor’s diagnosis to the Atsubetsu Police Station, who treated me again with deference and some respect for having Japanese citizenship. They confirmed the written-up report with me, asked me if I wished to press charges against the driver (I didn’t), and read it all back. I had not brought my inkan, but they allowed me to sign the form when I indicated I was unwilling to fingerprint it. At all times they were on the ball (I saw the drawing of the accident scene–it was clear and accurate) and after thirty minutes I was out the door.

The bike shop called later with a repairs estimate, which will be looked over when the insurance agency visits them for photos and assessments.

So far, so good. I anticipate some haggling over the repairs estimates by the insurance company, but that’s nothing to do with the cops. So just let me say in this interim report that I found the police to be fair, thorough, and in no way biased against me for my non-Japanese roots. Good.

Conclusion: Crucial is learning how to take charge linguistically, so those who find themselves in a similar situation had better understand the value of understanding Japanese, and having all their ducks in a row to establish credibility. Those who believe that NJ should not learn Japanese because they can get along just fine in English etc. (or mysteriously believe that they can get away with more due to some kind of “guest status”), wise up.

Thank heavens I had a responsible driver, as well. This went as smoothly as I think it possibly could have. More later if there’s anything to report.

Arudou Debito, limping along in Sapporo

==================
UPDATE JULY 10, 2007

Now that the smoke has cleared and the case is closed, final words on the outcome:

1) I got my bike fixed. It’s good as new and I’m cycling as before.

2) The injuries I suffered are no longer part of my life. Looks as though I just had a really bad Charley Horse on my lower leg for about two weeks. Shortly after that (and after some holistic treatment from a friend), my leg seems back to normal. No pain whatsoever.

3) The driver’s insurance company did what you’d expect from an insurance company (a la Michael Moore’s SICKO)–haggle. The agent tried to force me to pay ten percent of my bike’s repairs. I said that the police (and the driver) had acknowledged 100% fault on the driver, so I was not going to pay anything. When the agent tried to say that it’s customary for the victim to pay ten percent, I said: “Look, I’m not asking for any compensation or damages. Just to have all my repairs and medical bills paid–my costs out of pocket set to zero. I could ask for compensation (baishoukin, or isharyou) money on top, but the driver’s been such a nice chap that I didn’t have the heart. My mind could change, however, with the tone of this negotiation, and cost your company even more money. So let’s not haggle here over 8000 yen.”

An hour later, the insurance company called me back and said that the driver agreed to pay the last ten percent out of his pocket. Case closed.

And that’s that. In the end, it was probably the nicest experience I had this rotten June, and that’s saying something, I guess. Debito

Ibaraki NPA on How to deal with NJ: Riot Police

mytest

Hello Blog. Last day in the US before the long trip back to Japan, but here’s a little something I just got from a friend this morning:

=============================
STOP THEM AT THE SHORES, PROTECT [OUR COUNTRY].

PLEASE COOPERATE IN STOPPING ILLEGAL ALIENS AND THEIR ILLEGAL ENTRY.

CONTACT IBARAKI PREFECTURAL POLICE HQ
029-301-0110

Sponsored by the Ibaraki Prefectural Police Coast Guard Cooperative Union (Ibaraki ken keisatsu kaigan keikai kyouryoku rengokai)
=============================
(Click on the image itself there to make it full screen.)

IbarakiNPAposter07.jpg
Nothing like six riot police (seven, actually–look closely) in full regalia to protect us from the alien horde. Er, can horde be singular? Anyway, yet another example of overreaction and targeting by the government towards NJ.

Sure, raise awareness about overstayers and illegal entrants. But don’t make it seem as though there’s an invasion afoot, and that you need measures this extreme.

More examples of GOJ-sponsored foreign scaremongering at

https://www.debito.org/TheCommunity/communityissues.html#police

https://www.debito.org/opportunism.html

Debito at Cornell University

FT: UN Committee against Torture castigates Japan’s judiciary

mytest

Hello Blog. The Financial Times (London) reports that more bodies within the UN are joining the fray and pointing out Japan as not only a slacker in the human rights arenas, but also as sorely lacking in terms of checks and balances regarding the criminal procedure and the judiciary.

We’ve been saying things like this for years, glad to see it catching fire.

Pertinent UN Press Releases on this subject dated May 2007 are in the Comments section below the article (to save space), so do click on “Comments” at the very bottom if you are interested. Related article on how this pressure is starting to affect things (such as recording interrogations) blogged here.

The entire 11-page report being referred to in the FT article below is downloadable in MS Word format at
UNComttTortureMay2007.doc

Arudou Debito in Sapporo

=======================================

UN body attacks Japan’s justice system
By David Turner in Tokyo
Financial Times, May 23 2007

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/3dfc6122-08ca-11dc-b11e-000b5df10621.html
Courtesy of Ludwig Kanzler and Olaf Karthaus

A United Nations committee has castigated Japan’s criminal justice and prison system, listing a wide range of problems including the lack of an independent judiciary, an extremely low rate of acquittal and human rights abuses among detainees. The UN Committee Against Torture takes a broad interpretation of its brief, criticising the state’s physical treatment of citizens and the fairness of the justice system.

The report comes at an embarrassing time for Japan. The government has been trying to restore the country’s status as a nation with the moral and political authority of a world power, in addition to an economic powerhouse. Shinzo Abe has tried to accelerate this process since he became prime minister since last year, but with mixed results.

In an 11-page report completed last week, scarcely any part of the system escapes criticism. For example, it raises suspicions over a “disproportionately high number of convictions over acquittals”. There were only 63 acquittals in the year to March 2006, compared with 77,297 convictions, among criminal cases that had reached court, according to Japan’s Supreme Court.

In a version of the report released in Tokyo on Monday and described as “advanced unedited” [sic], the committee links the high conviction rate to the state’s emphasis on securing confessions before trial.

It cites fears about “the lack of means to verify the proper conduct of detainees while in police custody”, in particular “the absence of strict time limits for the duration of interrogations and the absence of mandatory presence of defence counsel”.

Parts of the law relating to inmates on death row “could amount to torture”, it says, criticising the “psychological strain imposed upon inmates and families” by the fact that “prisoners are notified of their execution only hours before it is due to take place”.

The committee also “is concerned about the insufficient level of independence of the judiciary”.

It attacks Japan’s dismissal of cases filed by “comfort women”, who were forced to work in military-run brothels during the war, on the grounds that the cases have passed the country’s statute of limitations.

The report, written after an 18-day session of the committee in Geneva, asks the Japanese government to consider a slew of measures, including “an immediate moratorium on executions”.

The committee issued its attack after receiving a report from the Japanese government on its efforts to prevent human rights abuses. All UN member states must submit such reports regularly, although the UN Committee scolds Japan for filing its report “over five years late”.

The committee’s findings are in line with complaints by human rights lawyers. But the report has attracted controversy within the UN.

Keiichi Aizawa, director of the Japan-based United Nations Asia and Far East Institute for the Prevention of Crime and the Treatment of Offenders, told the Financial Times: “The treatment of offenders in Japan is fair.”

Japan’s Justice Ministry declined to comment on the report.
ENDS
============================

REFERENCED UN COMMITTEE AGAINST TORTURE REPORT ON JAPAN MAY 2007 AVAILABLE IN FULL IN MS WORD FORMAT:
UNComttTortureMay2007.doc

Click on “Comments” below to see UN Press Releases.

LAT: First recorded police confession OK as evidence

mytest

Hi Blog. I’ve talked numerous times on Debito.org (artery site here) about your rights when under “voluntary detention” and arrest by Japanese police. (Headline: As there is the presumption of guilt, you don’t have many at all, and those being interrogated will be under constant pressure to confess to something in lengthy tag-team police interrogations over the course of weeks.)

This is especially germane as the NPA’s tendency has been to target NJ for instant questioning, search, and even seizure while under suspicion for, say, cycling while foreign-looking.

However, the LA Times came out with an article with some good news–a recorded police interrogation admitted in court. Now let’s hope that with recent pressure from both popular culture (Suo Masayuki’s movie I JUST DIDN’T DO IT) and from overseas (the UN) results in more judicial oversight, and required recordings of all police interactions with suspects (with lawyers present as well). Don’t hold your breath, but still…

I’ll have something tomorrow blogged here on the UN’s Committee Against Torture, and their recent harsh words for Japan’s judicial system. Stay tuned. Debito in Sapporo

=======================
Case may shine light on Japanese interrogations
A suspect’s confession is admitted as court evidence. The move could pave the way for greater oversight of the country’s secretive investigation culture.
By Bruce Wallace, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
May 26, 2007

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-confessions26may26,1,7852068.story?coll=la-headlines-world
Courtesy of Jon Lenvik

TOKYO — For the first time, a DVD recording of a suspect confessing his crime to police was admitted as evidence in a Japanese court Friday, a move that could lead to stricter checks on the lengthy, secret police interrogations that defense lawyers say result in pressure on suspects to make false confessions.

Prosecutors and police have long resisted demands from human rights activists and lawyers to record their questioning of suspects, who can be held without charge for 23 days in special police cells with limited access to defense lawyers.

But a court case here may open the way for greater oversight of the confession-based investigation culture.

Prosecutors record interrogation sessions only in cases of their choosing, and it was they who introduced the recording played during a murder trial in Tokyo District Court on Friday. The prosecution was seeking to demonstrate the credibility of a confession by a man accused of plotting the killing in a scheme to acquire insurance money.

Prosecutors asked the court to admit the recording as evidence when the accused changed aspects of his story during testimony.

But even though the prosecutors’ move was aimed at bolstering their case, it may also serve as a precedent for those who claim they confessed under coercion to demand that recordings of their interrogations be played in court as well.

Last week, the United Nations’ Committee Against Torture amplified Japanese activists’ call for an end to the nation’s system of pretrial detention of suspects in police stations without access to lawyers.

The committee said Japanese prosecutors were overly dependent on extracting confessions through long periods of incarceration and unlimited time for questioning, an investigative method that has resulted in an almost 100% conviction rate for cases that go to trial.

The committee demanded the 23-day holding period be shortened to match standards in other countries. And it said interrogations should be monitored by independent observers as well as recorded, so courts can later judge whether confessions may have been obtained through coercion.

“The Japanese police should now admit that they cannot investigate people for 23 days in detention,” said Eiichi Kaido, a lawyer who has been active in the campaign by Japanese bar associations to reform the system. “No other countries have such a long detention period. The U.N. report means the Japanese legal system has to be amended.”

The Justice Ministry said only that it was studying the U.N. report, noting that its recommendations cut across several government jurisdictions.

“We will examine it in a prudent manner and, depending on the content, will respond to it appropriately,” said Hiroshi Kikuchi of the ministry’s Criminal Affairs Bureau.

The government has shown little inclination to radically overhaul a system that is defended by police and that attracts little criticism from the Japanese public or media. The U.N. review of the justice system was largely ignored by media here, despite its charge that the Japanese system fails to meet minimal international standards in many areas.

The U.N. report also takes issue with Japan’s treatment of death row prisoners, noting that they await execution in solitary confinement that in some cases has stretched more than 30 years. It says Japan should consider commuting death sentences when the execution has been extensively delayed.

And it criticizes the Japanese practice of notifying prisoners of their execution only hours before it takes place. The U.N. condemned “the unnecessary secrecy and arbitrariness surrounding the time of the execution,” saying the measure imposes a psychological strain on prisoners and their families “that could amount to torture.”

bruce.wallace@latimes.com

Naoko Nishiwaki of The Times’ Tokyo Bureau contributed to this report.
ENDS

LA Times: More on forced police confessions

mytest

Hi Blog. Another in a series on how warped the judicial system here can get, with its overreliance on confession (as opposed to gathering evidence). To the point where we have a rare case of a former judge cracking and spilling his guts over a case, giving us some insight on how a panel of three judges could convict a person on circumstantial evidence. Pity the convicted has already spent 28 years in solitary confinement on death row…

Anyway, read on. Another good article. Debito in Sapporo

====================
Japan urged to come clean on confessions
Police routinely torment suspects, say activists for a death row convict whose judge admits, 40 years later, that he erred.
LOS ANGELES TIMES May 12, 2007
By Bruce Wallace Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-confessions12may12,1,5427226.story?coll=la-headlines-world
Courtesy of Larry G and Jon L

TOKYO — The physical evidence that implicated former pro boxer Iwao Hakamada in the stabbing deaths of a family of four on a summer night in 1966 was hardly conclusive.

The clothes prosecutors said he had worn during the killing did not fit him.

The murder weapon Hakamada allegedly used was, according to his lawyers, too small to make the wounds. And, they said, the door police claimed Hakamada used to enter and leave the victims’ house was locked.

But prosecutors had the most important piece of evidence they needed, enough for the three judges of the Shizuoka District Court to find Hakamada guilty and sentence him to death.

Hakamada’s confession.

It did not matter that Hakamada almost immediately retracted his admission and then testified during his trial that he had been beaten and threatened during extended interrogations over 22 days in a police detention cell, with no lawyer present. His signed admission of guilt has kept him in prison ever since, through failed appeals, still awaiting an execution that could come at any time.

Now his conviction is again under scrutiny, after the only surviving judge of the three-man panel that found him guilty — by consensus — broke four decades of silence to say he had always believed that Hakamada’s confession was coerced. The case is seen by analysts here as a stark illustration of the Japanese legal system’s addiction to acquiring convictions by confession.

“I knew right away that something was wrong with his confession,” said the former judge, Norimichi Kumamoto, after he finally went public with his belief that he had participated in sentencing an innocent man to die.

Kumamoto, 70, quit the bench six months after the 1968 trial, and says he has carried “hurt in his heart” over his role in sending Hakamada to death row.

“I have always regretted that I couldn’t persuade the chief judge” to acquit, he says. “He was older than me, and I thought that because he had experienced the war when freedoms were taken away or oppressed, that he would understand what had happened to Hakamada.

“But judges in Japan tended to be influenced by the media and social pressures, and the media were being very aggressive, describing [the accused] as an evil figure,” Kumamoto recalls. “And Japanese tend to believe that the prosecutors’ office, as an arm of the government, wouldn’t do anything intentionally wrong.”

Japanese courts deliberate in secret and verdicts are issued under all three names. (Japan does not have a jury system but plans to introduce a hybrid form of judges and juries in 2009.) Kumamoto kept his doubts about the boxer’s conviction to himself, maintaining silence even as Hakamada’s confession was cited as the reason for turning down his appeals and a bid for retrial.

When the ex-judge finally went public in March at a news conference in Tokyo, much of the subsequent media coverage attacked him for flouting a law prohibiting judges from disclosing deliberations.

Some, however, did welcome Kumamoto’s blistering indictment of the system’s reliance on confessions to maintain a conviction rate that exceeds 99% in criminal trials. Unlike American law, which gives suspects the right to have a lawyer present during questioning, Japan allows police to interrogate people without a lawyer for as many as 23 days before pressing charges or releasing them. They can then be rearrested, beginning another 23-day session.

‘Substitute prisons’

The suspects are kept in small holding cells known as daiyo kangoku, or “substitute prisons,” a setting that critics say allows police to coerce confessions to crimes they did not commit. The Japan Federation of Bar Assns. recently joined human rights groups in contending that holding suspects in such cramped conditions, with little or no contact with the outside world, “is a breeding ground of confession coercion and false accusations.”

“This type of interrogation causes heavy mental suffering to suspects and can be considered torture,” the lawyers group said.

Some judges have shown an increased willingness to question the methods used to acquire confessions. In February, a judge in western Japan reprimanded police and prosecutors for their handling of a case in which 12 defendants were eventually found not guilty of using beer and cash to buy votes in a local election.

Six of the suspects had confessed, but the judge ruled that they probably did so “to please the investigators, as they desperately wanted to be released.”

Police had arrested, released and rearrested some of the suspects — one defendant was held for a total of 395 days — and some said they had been told that unless they confessed, their children would be fired from their jobs. The bullying was so bad that one defendant tried to drown himself, but was rescued.

In two other high-profile cases this year, murder and rape convictions were overturned that had been based solely on confessions extracted under intense pressure.

In 2005, the government made slight modifications to the daiyo kangoku system, allowing video cameras to record questioning in select cases.

But the bar associations say the location of the interview is itself the problem: a holding cell where a suspect can be questioned at any time, for any length of time, without food, breaks or a lawyer.

“Even strong people can confess under those circumstances,” says Katsuhiko Nishijima, a Tokyo human rights lawyer who is at the forefront of the legal campaign to get Hakamada’s conviction overturned.

The greatest resistance to introducing new guidelines comes from the police, Nishijima said. “The police argue that videotaping interviews and allowing lawyers would destroy the necessary trust between police and the suspect,” he said.

Many here say the dependence on confessions is a cultural phenomenon in a country where even the best TV detectives are the ones who pull an admission from the crook in a dramatic interrogation scene rather than uncover evidence.

“The general public has trust in this confession system,” Nishijima says. “It’s in the Japanese DNA: There’s a belief that if you commit a crime, you should come clean and confess. When someone is arrested, the newspapers report that ‘police are now aggressively interrogating the suspect.’ And if he doesn’t confess, then the public are unhappy. ‘Ah, he’s still denying it,’ they say.”

That’s why the recent criminal trial of fallen Internet mogul Takafumi Horie for financial malfeasance was seen here as so extraordinary: The young businessman refused to confess during his incarceration. Other top executives at his firm quickly admitted guilt to investigators and agreed to testify against their boss. But Horie held out and, at his trial, made a rare not-guilty plea. He was convicted anyway.

Maintaining innocence

Since recanting his initial confession, Hakamada, too, has always denied any guilt. His lawyers say the onetime contender for Japan’s flyweight crown now refuses to see either family or his lawyers, his mental condition having deteriorated over 28 years in solitary confinement on death row. In Japan, death row inmates are not told when their sentences will be carried out and some have awaited execution for decades. The 99 inmates currently awaiting hanging live with the knowledge that their death will come with as little as a few minutes’ warning.

Working on Hakamada’s behalf, a team of lawyers and activists, which includes 12 former Japanese boxing champions, announced this week that they would petition the Supreme Court for a retrial. They are optimistic that the late-in-life admission by the judge who helped send him away can still free Hakamada, who is 71.

The former judge himself, aging and becoming weaker, says he is trying to right a wrong before it’s too late for both of them. Kumamoto saw himself as a rising star in the judiciary in the mid-1960s, working his way up the case ladder in Tokyo District Court. He had no compunctions about capital punishment, having presided over five death penalty convictions before Hakamada’s trial.

When he arrived in Shizuoka prefecture to hear the boxer’s trial, the media were clamoring for a conviction. But Kumamoto had also schooled himself in American case law, using Time magazine as a reference for U.S. Supreme Court cases of interest. He was particularly impressed by the Warren court of the 1950s and ’60s, lauding it for “its professionalism and its commitment to the rights of the accused.”

Listening to the evidence, Kumamoto says, he believed the boxer was innocent of the murder charges. Hakamada described in court how police pulled his hair and slapped him during interrogations that lasted more than 12 hours a day, and how he was forced to use a portable toilet in the room. He testified that police threatened to bring his mother and brothers in for questioning as well unless he confessed.

By the morning of the 21st day, he said, he was dizzy, feverish and wanted only to rest. Begging for a break, he offered to confess “in the afternoon” if they would just allow him to rest. Instead, the officers came back into the room with a document labeled “Confession” and berated him into signing. He told the court the document was never read to him.

“I wanted a silence and had a headache so just wrote down my name and put my head down on the table,” he testified. “They held my hand and took my fingerprint.”

‘Media pressure’

Although the interrogators testified that they did not use force to get the confession, Kumamoto says he was convinced at the time that it was unreliable. The retired judge says he had even drafted a thick “not guilty” ruling to be read in court when the other two judges insisted on a conviction and ordered him to rewrite the ruling.

“It was half because of the confession, half because of the media pressure,” Kumamoto explains.

He still can’t get Hakamada out of his mind. The images come to him in the late afternoons, he says: the way Hakamada confidently met the judges’ eyes when they entered the courtroom, convinced he was about to be set free. The way his body slumped and his head fell forward at the guilty verdict.

“I couldn’t hear the words that I had written being read out in court,” Kumamoto recalls, tears in his eyes. “I almost lost my mind.”

Kumamoto said he always hoped that a higher court would overturn the verdict. He never considered going public until now. Not after he left the judiciary when a senior judge suggested to him that such a liberal thinker would be happier and more productive as a lawyer or academic. Not during Hakamada’s appeals and pleas for retrials.

“There was no right time until now,” Kumamoto says, refusing to elaborate.

But he’s ready to meet Hakamada to apologize. “And I’ll stand as a witness for him in the Supreme Court, if this is possible,” he says.

“It’s getting late. It’s the last chance.”

—————————
bruce.wallace@latimes.com

Hisako Ueno of The Times’ Tokyo Bureau contributed to this report.
ENDS

NYT on forced confessions by Japanese police

mytest

Hi Blog. Thanks to two friends for sending me this. Another good article from former hack and now serious journalist Norimitsu Onishi. Keep it up!

Japan’s interrogation techniques of 23 days’ incarceration with marathon inquests break down plenty of innocent people, as the article below demonstrates. A primer on the issue available at debito.org artery site at https://www.debito.org/whattodoif.html#arrested

IF YOU DID NOT DO IT, DON’T CONFESS. OR ELSE YOU WILL GO TO JAIL.

And it’s certainly an issue germane to this blog since Japanese police routinely engage in racial profiling and targeting foreigners–expressly in the name of “effective prevention of infectious diseases and terrorism”. It’s lucky that with Japan’s extremely high conviction rates (more than 99%) that these people got off. Arudou Debito in Sapporo

=====================================
Pressed by Police, Even Innocent Confess in Japan
THE NEW YORK TIMES, May 11, 2007
By NORIMITSU ONISHI

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/11/world/asia/11japan.html?ex=1179547200&en=a4eb5f0efa88a7a9&ei=5070&emc=eta1

SHIBUSHI, Japan — The suspects in a vote-buying case in this small town in western Japan were subjected to repeated interrogations and, in several instances, months of pretrial detention. The police ordered one woman to shout her confession out a window and forced one man to stomp on the names of his loved ones.

In all, 13 men and women, ranging in age from their early 50s to mid-70s, were arrested and indicted. Six buckled and confessed to an elaborate scheme of buying votes with liquor, cash and catered parties. One man died during the trial — from the stress, the others said — and another tried to kill himself.

But all were acquitted this year in a local district court, which found that their confessions had been entirely fabricated. The presiding judge said the defendants had “made confessions in despair while going through marathon questioning.”

The Japanese authorities have long relied on confessions to take suspects to court, instead of building cases based on solid evidence. Human rights groups have criticized the practice for leading to abuses of due process and convictions of innocent people.

But in recent months developments in this case and two others have shown just how far the authorities will go in securing confessions. Calls for reforms in the criminal justice system have increased, even as Japan is to adopt a jury-style system in 2009 and is considering allowing victims and their relatives to question defendants in court.

In Saga Prefecture in March, a high court upheld the acquittal of a man who said he had been coerced into confessing to killing three women in the late 1980s. The court found that there was no evidence against the man other than the confession, which had been extracted from him after 17 days of interrogations that went on more than 10 hours a day.

In Toyama Prefecture the police acknowledged early this year that a taxi driver who had served almost three years in prison for rape and attempted rape in 2002 was innocent, after they found the real culprit. The driver said he had been browbeaten into affixing his fingerprint to a confession drawn up by the police after three days of interrogation.

“I Just Didn’t Do It,” a new documentary by Masayuki Suo, the director of “Shall We Dance?” has also raised popular awareness of coerced confessions. The documentary is based on the real-life story of a young man who was falsely accused of groping a teenage girl on the Tokyo subway and imprisoned for 14 months. It portrays how the authorities extract confessions, whether the accused are guilty or not.

“Traditionally in Japan, confessions have been known as the king of evidence,” said Kenzo Akiyama, a lawyer who is a former judge. “Especially if it’s a big case, even if the accused hasn’t done anything, the authorities will seek a confession through psychological torture.”

The law allows the police to detain suspects for up to 23 days without an indictment. Suspects have almost no contact with the outside world and are subject to constant interrogation, a practice that has long drawn criticism from organizations like the United Nations Human Rights Committee and Amnesty International.

Suspects are strongly pressed to plead guilty, on the premise that confession is the first step toward rehabilitation.

The conviction rate in Japanese criminal cases — 99.8 percent — cannot be compared directly with that of the United States, because there is no plea bargaining in Japan and prosecutors bring only those cases they are confident of winning. But experts say that in court, where acquittals are considered harmful to the careers of prosecutors and judges alike, there is a presumption of guilt.

In Tokyo, the National Police Agency acknowledged mistakes in the vote-buying case here in Shibushi but defended the system. “We do not think that this is the kind of thing that happens all the time,” said Yasuhiro Shirakawa of the agency’s Criminal Investigation Bureau.

“It is not only about confessions,” he added. “We always inspect whether there is corroborating evidence and whether what the suspects said is true or not.”

In Shibushi, the authorities have gone unpunished, as have those in the two other cases. In a written reply, the police said they had followed the law in their investigation but seriously took the verdict to heart.

It remains unclear what set off the investigation in 2003 of the campaign of a local politician, Shinichi Nakayama, who was elected for the first time to the local assembly that year, beating the protégé of a longtime power broker.

The police started by accusing Sachio Kawabata — whose wife, Junko, is the assemblyman’s cousin — of giving cases of beer to a construction company in return for votes. Mr. Kawabata said he had given the beer because the company had sent guests to an inn that he owned.

Mr. Kawabata soon found himself enduring nearly 15 hours of interrogation a day. Locked in a tiny room with an inspector who shouted and threatened, he refused to confess.

So on the third day, Mr. Kawabata recalled, the inspector scribbled the names of his family members on three pieces of paper. He added messages — “Grandpa, please hurry up and become an honest grandpa,” and “I don’t remember raising you to be this kind of person” — and told Mr. Kawabata to repent.

Drawing no confession after an hour, the inspector grabbed Mr. Kawabata by the ankles and made him trample on the pieces of paper.

“I was shocked,” recalled Mr. Kawabata, 61, who was hospitalized for two weeks from the stress of the interrogation. “Man, I thought, how far will the police go?”

Mr. Kawabata, who was never indicted, recently won a $5,000 judgment for mental anguish. Trampling the pieces of paper, it turned out, had its roots in a local feudal practice of ferreting out suspected Christians by forcing them to stomp on a cross.

The police then moved on to more potent alcohol. According to the trial’s verdict and interviews with 17 people interrogated by the authorities, the police concocted a description of events according to which the assemblyman spent $17,000 to buy votes with shochu, a popular distilled spirit, and gifts of cash.

One of the first to confess was Ichiko Fujimoto, 53, a former employee of the assemblyman. After a couple of days of interrogation she broke down and admitted not only to distributing shochu and cash to her neighbors, but also to giving four parties at her home to gather support for the assemblyman.

“It’s because they kept saying, ‘Confess, just confess,’ ” Ms. Fujimoto said in an interview at her home. “They wouldn’t listen to anything I said.”

Everything in her confession was made up, a court concluded. But it was enough for the police to start extracting confessions from others for supposedly receiving shochu and money at the parties. One neighbor, Toshihiro Futokoro, 58, began despairing on the third day of interrogation, even though he had yet to be formally arrested and was allowed to go home after each day’s questioning.

“They kept saying that everybody’s confessing, that there was nothing that I could do, no matter how hard I tried,” Mr. Futokoro said, adding, “I thought that nothing I said would ever convince them.”

At the end of the third day, Mr. Futokoro tried to kill himself by jumping into a river but was pulled out by a man out fishing. He then confessed.

Another man, Kunio Yamashita, 76, succumbed after a week of interrogation. The police told him that he was the lone holdout and that he could go home if he confessed. “I hadn’t done anything, but I confessed, and I told them I’d admit to whatever they said,” said Mr. Yamashita, who eventually spent three months in jail.

A woman, Eiko Hamano, 65, confessed after the police threatened to arrest her unless she cooperated. “They said that my grandson would be bullied at school, that my child would be fired from his company, that my whole family would suffer forever,” she recalled.

On the fourth day, feeling so sick that she could barely walk, Ms. Hamano confessed to accepting money. To prove that she had spent the money, the police told her to find a receipt for an $85 purchase, she said.

But when she presented the police an $85 receipt for adult diapers she had bought for her mother, they told her she was now confessing to having received $170 instead and needed a receipt for that amount. Luckily, she had just bought a sink for that amount.

“Now I can laugh about it,” said Ms. Hamano, who refused an order by the police to shout a confession out of a window. “But it was serious back then.”

Others never confessed, including the assemblyman, Mr. Nakayama, 61, who spent 395 days in jail, and his wife, Shigeko, 58, who spent 273 days.

The village postmaster, Tomeko Nagayama, 77, spent 186 days behind bars. She was held alone in a windowless cell that she was forced to clean every night after enduring a full day of interrogation.

The police said her refusal to confess was harming her family, she said. Her husband was sick and could not live alone; her daughter had to quit her job to take over the duties at the post office.

But Ms. Nagayama, a former schoolteacher, never once considered confessing.

“I felt I’d rather die,” she said. “This kind of thing just shouldn’t be tolerated in this world.”
ENDS

KTO on GAIJIN HANZAI and foreign crime

mytest

Hi Blog. Tonight’s entry (since I’m finding my Kyushu Cycletrek report harder going than I thought–a lot more to say than I anticipated) will be something I got from friend Steve this morning from the Kansai Time Out. Since KTO is not available everywhere in Japan, here are the pages scanned. All about GAIJIN HANZAI Mag and the media/GOJ’s approach to sexing up foreign crime. Hope you can stand run-on sentences…

Anyway, the article says what we’ve been saying all along for years now; glad to see other reporters agree. More on GAIJIN HANZAI blogged here at https://www.debito.org/?cat=27 (page down to see previous articles. Arudou Debito in Sapporo

(Click on image to see full file.)

Foreign Crime -- KTO_Page_1-1.jpg

Foreign Crime -- KTO_Page_2-1.jpg
ENDS

IPS: Xenophobia May Hamper Economic Growth

mytest

Hi Blog. Here’s another article outlining the social damage created by Japan’s close-to-a-decade (since April 2000, see my book JAPANESE ONLY) of media, police, and governmental targeting of NJ as agents of crime and social instability: Even when the press finally decides to turn down the heat, the public has a hard time getting over it.

More on the history of the GOJ’s anti-foreign campaigns starting from:

https://www.debito.org/TheCommunity/communityissues.html#gaijinimages

https://www.debito.org/TheCommunity/communityissues.html#police

One more stat from the article below:

“On average, foreigners are paid around 15,000 US dollars annually, almost half the minimum considered necessary to live in this country.”

Hope to see this substantiated more fully elsewhere so we can cite it in future. That’s quite a bellwether wage differential.

Debito in Sapporo

================================

LABOUR-JAPAN:

Xenophobia May Hamper Economic Growth

By Suvendrini Kakuchi

Inter Press Service News Agency, May 8, 2007

http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=37549

Courtesy of Hans ter Horst

TOKYO, Apr 30 (IPS) – Junko Nakayama, 56, refuses to believe that the number of foreigners arrested for crimes is decreasing as per statistics released by the National Policy Agency.

”There are an increasing number of foreigners, mostly Asian, in the area where I live and they look menacing. I am now very nervous when I walk back home from the train station in the evening,” she says.

Nakayama, who works in an international company, is not alone. Surveys indicate that more Japanese — over 70 percent in a poll — believe that the influx of foreigners into Japan is posing a threat to the country’s famed domestic peace. The notion is fuelled, say activists, by sensationalism in the media over crimes committed by overseas workers.

Accepting foreign migrant workers and treating them equally has been a long simmering debate in Japan where pride in national homogeneity is deep-rooted.

Says Nobushita Yaegashi at Kalaba No Kai, a leading grass roots group helping foreign labour: �-?’Despite new steps to allow foreign workers into Japan, they are viewed as cheap labour not as individuals who have the right to settle down and make a life in Japan. This policy reveals Japan’s xenophobia and is represented in the media.”

The debate over foreigners and crime was highlighted in January when prosecutors in San Paulo, Brazil, charged Milton Noboru Higaki, a former Brazilian worker in Japan, with professional negligence in a hit-and-run case in 1999.

Higaki, a Brazilian of Japanese descent, fled to Brazil four days after the incident that killed a high school girl Mayumi Ochiai, then 16. Her parents then pursued Higaki in his home country in a case that hailed in Japan as a step forward in ensuring judicial accountability of foreigners. Brazil and Japan have no extradition accord and Brazil’s laws forbid the handover of its nationals to foreign countries.

In 2005, Chinese nationals topped the list of foreigners arrested for crime. Nikkei, or second and third generation, Brazilians came next. According to justice ministry figures there are 320,000 of Nikkei living in Japan, working mostly in factories.

�-?The Yomiuri’, Japan’s largest daily, commented on Feb. 17 in an editorial titled �-?Fleeing foreign criminals should be tried in Japan’, said �-?’crimes committed by foreign residents is a serious problem”. The editorial called for a “stringent stance by the Japanese authorities in not allowing foreign criminals to escape punishment.”

But Yasuko Morioka, a human rights attorney, says the media would have done better to focus on the lack of laws to protect foreigners’ rights in Japan. �-?’There is no doubt that provision for access to professional interpretation, documents in their native language, and a legal hearing that considers the rights of foreign foreign workers is largely lacking in Japan,” she explained to IPS.

Morioka said there is no attempt to link crimes committed by Japanese-Brazilian workers to the abuses they suffer — poor working conditions, denial of education for children due to language barriers, discrimination and gross state negligence.

Japan is an attractive labour market for Asian and Latin American overseas workers given the high value of the Japanese yen. On average, foreigners are paid around 15,000 US dollars annually, almost half the minimum considered necessary to live in this country.

Eagerly sought after by small manufacturing companies and farms for cheap labour, they are considered essential to stay competitive against rapid globalisation.

Activists also say Japanese employers easily get away without paying compensation or providing relief when foreign employees are injured during work on the grounds of the lack of documented visas or access to an established system where workers can report this abuse.

Indeed, Higaki was quoted in the media as saying the reason why he fled was because he feared ‘discrimination’ as a foreigner in Japanese courts.

”The charge is understandable,” said Morioka, who is lobbying hard, with the Japan Lawyers Association, for the government to pass legislation that will guarantee the right of foreigners to be treated equally in the host country.

Experts warn that resistance to accepting migrant workers on an equal basis in Japan can result in a host of social problems that can only be blamed on government policies.

According to Hidenori Sakanaka, a former justice ministry official, Japanese companies are desperate to take in foreign workers to make up for a drastic population decline that can only worsen in the coming years.

Japan needs immigrant workers because its own population is both aging and declining. In 2005, deaths outnumbered births by 10,000. From 2006 onwards, the population was projected to dwindle steadily with some projections saying that Japan’s population, currently standing at 127 million, could dwindle to around 100 million by 2050. (FIN/2007)

ENDS

Lucie Blackman’s alleged killer acquitted, given life for other crimes

mytest

Hi Blog. More Japanese judiciary at work. Brief comment (have to keep it brief tonight–done four speeches at ICU these past two days and have to work on the Powerpoint for tomorrow’s) and other articles follow:

========================
Serial rapist Obara gets life term
Developer acquitted in Blackman slaying but sent up over Ridgway’s murder
The Japan Times, Tuesday, April 24, 2007

http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/nn20070424x1.html
Compiled from AP, Kyodo

The Tokyo District Court acquitted wealthy property developer Joji Obara of the 2000 death and dismemberment of British bar hostess Lucie Blackman but sentenced him to life for the slaying of an Australian woman and a series of rapes nearly a decade ago.

Obara, 54, was charged with serial rape and the death of two foreign women — Blackman in 2000 in a case that became one of Japan’s most notorious sex crimes and raised concerns over the safety of women in night clubs and the sex industry here, and Australian Carita Ridgway in 1992.

Despite widely reported circumstantial evidence, Obara was cleared of all charges relating to Blackman. He was sentenced to life for nine other rapes, including the attack that led to Ridgway’s 1992 death — a case that may have gone unpunished, ironically, had Blackman’s disappearance not triggered suspicions that led to the accused.

Obara was charged with raping and fatally drugging Blackman, and mutilating and burying her body in cement in a cave near one of his seaside condominiums. But Presiding Judge Tsutomu Tochigi said there was “no evidence to link the suspect directly to” the dismembering and burying of her body.

Obara, a regular at bars in Tokyo where foreign women pour drinks for clients, was never charged with murder, but instead the lesser charge of “rape leading to death.”

Ridgway was a 21-year-old acting student who also worked as a bar hostess in Tokyo when, according to prosecutors, Obara gave her a drug overdose and raped her in 1992, and she died in a hospital. Her death, however, was not linked to the millionaire until Blackman’s disappearance years later.

Blackman was also 21 and working at a Tokyo night club in 2000 when she disappeared after telling a friend she was going on a drive with a male customer. Her dismembered body was discovered in a seaside cave near Obara’s condominium in Miura, Kanagawa Prefecture, in early 2001, her head encased in concrete.

Prosecutors had alleged that Obara invited Blackman to another of his condos in nearby Zushi in June 2000, drugged her and raped her after she fell unconscious. When Blackman died of a drug overdose, he dismembered her and buried her corpse steps away from the Miura condo, the charges said.

Obara claimed in testimony that Blackman took the drugs herself. His defense argued that no direct evidence has been presented by the prosecution to link Obara to her death, the cause of which remains unknown because of the nature of her remains.

Obara was convicted Tuesday for a string of other rapes, including two more involving foreign women he met at Tokyo hostess clubs. He videotaped many of the attacks.

He had met his victims at nightclubs, had drinks with them and then brought them back to his Zushi condominium, where he drugged them with alcohol and chloroform.

Obara pleaded innocent to all the charges.

While his defense said it has not been proven that Ridgway was drugged to death, Judge Tochigi determined that she died of acute hepatitis due to the intake of chloroform.

Blackman’s disappearance in July 2000 triggered one of Japan’s highest-profile hunts.

The Blackman family has repeatedly come to Tokyo to urge prosecutors and lawmakers to make Lucie’s case a priority, and called on the public to give police any potentially helpful information.

Lucie’s father, Tim, and his daughter, Sophie, were in Tokyo to hear the verdict. “The length of the process and so many years of waiting and wondering has been tough on the Blackman family,” the father said Monday after visiting the cave where Lucie’s body was found.

The verdict also comes as Japanese police are investigating another high-profile murder of a Briton last month.

Lindsay Ann Hawker, whose naked body was found in a sand-filled bathtub on the balcony of an apartment in Chiba Prefecture, was beaten and then suffocated, and police are still hunting for the prime suspect, Tatsuya Ichihashi, who lived in the apartment and had allegedly stalked the victim, who taught English for the Nova language school chain.
ARTICLE ENDS
======================

COMMENT: Japan has many famous “enzai” (framing) cases, where the police try very hard to make the case that someone is guilty, even with only circumstantial evidence.

One example here, the Eniwa Enzai Jiken:
http://www4.ocn.ne.jp/~sien/
http://stone2.at.infoseek.co.jp/eniwa.html
Other enzai cases here:
http://www.sayama-case.com/ring/ring.cgi
(Articles in Japanese)

And a brief on the case (old, no newer article found on JT site) here:

==========================
Murder arrest looms
The Japan Times, May 23, 2000
(page down past first article)
http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/nn20000523a5.html

SAPPORO (Kyodo) Police Monday were expected to arrest a 29-year-old former coworker of a woman whose charred body was found in Eniwa, Hokkaido, in March, on suspicion of murder and dumping a body.

According to police, a passerby found the charred body of Kaori Hashimukai, 24, from Komakomai, Hokkaido, on a street in Eniwa, on the morning of March 17.

The direct cause of her death was determined to be suffocation, and police suspect Hashimukai was burned at the scene after she was murdered.

Hashimukai had been unaccounted for since she left her office in the city of Chitose, near Sapporo, on March 16.

A police investigation found Hashimukai’s vehicle in a parking lot at JR Osatsu Station in Chitose near her office.

Her cellular phone, which was found in her office locker, was used after she was murdered, they said.

Police suspected someone familiar with Hashimukai committed the slaying, and they had been investigating her close friends.

The former coworker from the town of Hayakita, Hokkaido, whose identity was withheld, was with Hashimukai when she left the office the night of her disappearance, police said.

Meanwhile, the suspect filed a civil suit with the Sapporo District Court the same day demanding 5 million yen from the Hokkaido government for the emotional suffering caused by her questioning at the hands of police.

According to the lawsuit, the woman was placed under observation by investigators for roughly a month after police decided she was a possible suspect in the case.

She was admitted to the psychiatric unit of a hospital in Sapporo after being questioned over a 14-hour period as part of voluntary questioning sessions, the lawsuit said.

The former coworker, who was discharged from the hospital Monday, maintains in the lawsuit that she suffered mental anguish from the investigation, which she said was not based on objective evidence but was merely aimed at obtaining a confession from her.
ARTICLE ENDS
======================

She lost in District and High Court later on, thanks to police efforts to convict her…

And here’s today’s Japan Times news analysis raising the question (to me, anyway) about how Japan’s police keep faffing up cases of crime against foreign criminals:

======================

Approach to Blackman slaying hit, likened to Keystone Cops
Faulty police procedures seen foiling quick action, prevention
The Japan Times, Tuesday, April 24, 2007

http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/nn20070424f1.html
By JUN HONGO AND ERIC PRIDEAUX
Staff writers

After years of litigation closely watched around the world, the Tokyo District Court sentenced property developer Joji Obara to life in prison Tuesday for raping and drugging nine women, including Australian Carita Ridgway who subsequently died, but acquitted him of all the charges related to the death of Briton Lucie Blackman.

In the Blackman investigation, the highest profile of the 10 cases, despite pressure from the British government and frequent visits to Japan by Blackman’s family since her disappearance in July 2000, authorities were never able to assemble enough evidence to charge Obara, 54, with murdering the former stewardess-turned-Roppongi bar hostess. He denies the charge.

Blackman’s dismembered body was discovered in a cave on Kanagawa Prefecture’s Miura Peninsula in February 2001, about 200 meters from one of Obara’s many summer getaway homes.

Yet Obara has said prosecutors lack sufficient evidence to hold him responsible for Blackman’s death, the dismemberment of her body or any of the other charges.

“The court should give me the benefit of the doubt,” Obara, a once affluent property developer who fell down on his luck, said in a statement released after his counsel’s closing arguments in December.

But many informed observers disagree. One is former police officer Akio Kuroki, a 23-year Metropolitan Police Department detective who said that in the Blackman case, at least, the defendant stands firmly implicated.

“Everything points to Obara,” he said.

On July 1, 2000, Blackman, a 21-year-old hostess at the now-defunct Roppongi club Casablanca, went on an outing with a client from the club, telling her Tokyo roommates by cell phone that she would visit the beach with him and would not be late in returning.

She promised to call again within two hours, according to prosecutors.

That was the last time she was ever heard from. On July 3, the girlfriends received a phone call from a man identifying himself as Akira Takagi, saying that Blackman was in Chiba Prefecture and had joined a cult and was not planning to return, according to trial records.

The following day, the women alerted police that Blackman was missing, describing the phone call to the authorities. Prosecutors say the call was traced to a prepaid cell phone bought by Obara and that he placed the call.

Newspapers started publicizing Blackman’s disappearance on July 13. Prosecutors say that on July 20, the Azabu Police Station received a letter purporting to be written by Blackman, saying she had vanished on her own accord.

Similar letters would arrive in the following months, they said.

It was reportedly after the first letter arrived that police began a rigorous search of Roppongi.

That turned their suspicions toward a certain wealthy man who frequented the local hostess bars. But it would be months before Obara was arrested.

Several brushes with the law might have put Obara on investigators’ radar screens early on, but didn’t.

According to a May 2001 article in Time Magazine, in early October 1997, a young British hostess had shown up at her Roppongi job drugged and gravely ill after spending time with a man the article said was “now believed to be Obara.” Medical exams, the magazine said, indicated she had sustained liver damage.

Her boss, Kazuo Iizuka, took the woman to police on several occasions, urging her to file rape charges against the then-unknown assailant, but police refused to open a case because the woman was a hostess, according to the magazine.

Asked by telephone about the report, a Tokyo Metropolitan Police spokesman refused to comment, because, he said, “Those events occurred in the past.”

A police spokeswoman was also reluctant to provide details in a subsequent query.

In 1998, Obara, using a fake name, was arrested on a Wakayama Prefecture beach after slipping into a women’s restroom dressed in drag in an attempt to surreptitiously videotape a woman using the toilet. He was released after paying a 9,000 yen fine.

And five days after Blackman was last heard from, on July 6, 2000, police received a call from the manager of Obara’s condominium on the shores of the Miura Peninsula and were told of a tenant who had been making lots of noise in his unit the day before.

Prosecutors say police visited the apartment that evening and found Obara naked from the waist up, covered in sweat. Officers asked permission to look around his apartment and were allowed in. Chunks of cement were strewn near the entrance and around the apartment. Asked about this, Obara said he had been “removing tiles,” according to a trial transcript.

When officers requested access to the bathroom, Obara said, “You’ve already seen enough.” Upon further questioning, he grew agitated and the officers eventually left.

Besides the concrete debris, officers also glimpsed a bulky sack in the room and what appeared to be a gardening hoe.

As peculiar as that scene may seem in retrospect, Kuroki, the former detective, stressed that because the Miura police at that point were not even aware of Blackman’s disappearance, they had no reason to be more suspicious of Obara.

Article 35 of the Constitution protects citizens against police searches without “adequate cause.” Still, the Police Execution of Duties Law permits searches of “land, buildings and vehicles” when police “have sufficient reason to believe that a crime has been or is about to be committed” based on “suspicious circumstances.”

Kuroki is disappointed that prosecutors, who claim the sack may have contained Blackman’s dismembered corpse, failed to present any proof.

“Had the officers gone further into the apartment, they would have found solid evidence, and prosecutors could have charged Obara with murder,” Kuroki said.

That September, other victims came forward upon hearing of Blackman’s disappearance and identified Obara, a patron of hers at her hostess club, as someone who had date-raped them. Obara was arrested in October.

Although Blackman’s hair was found at Obara’s apartment in Zushi, Kanagawa Prefecture, none of her blood was, and he stayed mum while in detention.

It wasn’t until the following February that Blackman’s body was discovered buried at the seaside cave, each part encased in concrete and so badly decomposed that the cause of death could not be determined.

Questions also surround the investigation into the death of Ridgway, a 21-year-old Ginza hostess who, having taken ill, was dropped off by a man at a Tokyo hospital. The Australian woman was diagnosed with acute hepatitis and died two weeks later.

Although the man accompanying Ridgway had identified himself as Akira Nishida, prosecutors say a hospital receipt found in Obara’s home after his arrest identifies him as the man in question.

After Obara’s arrest, tests were conducted on Ridgway’s liver, a part of which had been preserved. Prosecutors and news reports say that toxic levels of chloroform were behind the death, but according to medical expert testimony during the trial, it was impossible to prove what triggered the onset of acute hepatitis.

Obara is reported to have kept extensive records of sexual encounters with women. According to respected Australian newspaper The Age, an entry found in a confiscated Obara diary contains the name Carita Ridgway, and beside that, “Too much chloroform.”

Obara disputes any suggestion that he poisoned the woman, and said in his December statement, “It is believable that Ridgway died from shellfish poisoning.”

Details have gradually emerged about Obara, including allegations that he had a penchant for filming the rape of drugged women. Police say the person in the video committing those acts appears to be him in a mask. Yet evidence to substantiate murder charges appears to be lacking.

A tabloid, however, alleged some of the videos show the arm of another male who may have been involved. This man was missing a pinkie and had a tattoo, but no other suspect has been named in the case.

Although professing his innocence, Obara paid Blackman’s father, Timothy, a large sum of money allegedly so he would be less vocal about the case, and also offered money to Lucie’s divorced mother, but she refused.

The way police handled the Blackman and Ridgway deaths appear remarkably similar to that of Lindsay Ann Hawker, a 22-year-old Briton found slain last month.

The suspect in that murder, Tatsuya Ichihashi, 28, gave several officers the slip at his Chiba Prefecture apartment, where Hawker’s strangled corpse was found in a disconnected tub full of sand on his balcony.

He had allegedly been stalking Hawker, an English teacher at a Nova school, and she had agreed to go to his apartment to give him a private lesson.

Although police claim their team was properly positioned when they went to question Ichihashi on Hawker’s disappearance on March 26, he managed to bolt down a fire escape and remains at large.

As in the Blackman case, human limitations appear to play a part in the failure by police to convincingly pin the crime on a suspect.

But Tomomi Ando, a lawyer of 24 years, said that as in the Blackman case, limitations on how far police can carry out their initial search may have been a factor in their failure to nab Ichihashi.

“Since both (Obara and Ichihashi) were not (formal) suspects at that point, it would have been a misuse of authority and an illegal investigation if they probed further,” Ando said.

Either way, he said, in both cases, police could have been more suspicious and modified their tactics while still remaining within the scope of the law.

“It’s no simple matter,” Ando said. “Police might not have not been able to ransack the apartments, but it was possible for them to place officers appropriately (in the Ichihashi search) to avoid a getaway or strengthen their surveillance of Obara.”

=====================

For more stories related to the Lucie Blackman case on the Japan Times, click here

Arudou Debito in Musashisakai, Tokyo

Metropolis on police treatment of crime against NJ

mytest

Hi Blog. Here’s an article which will hopefully start the pendelum swinging backwards on the whole “foreigners are potential criminals” starting point whenever NJ interact which the police. Some advice follows from the US Embassy (gleaned after a recent email exchange over yet another case of post-assault police negligence) which would have made my closing comments a little more informative. Debito

=============================

Feature
Crime Spree
Foreigners who turn to Japan’s justice system for help find themselves ignored. Is incompetence to blame—or racism?
METROPOLIS MAGAZINE #677 MARCH 16, 2007
By Oscar Johnson

http://metropolis.co.jp/tokyo/677/feature.asp

By all accounts, Matt Lacey was doing well in the early summer of 2004. The 42-year-old American was a language student at a YMCA in Fukuoka, and he had plans to open his own business. Then in August, a friend who became worried about his absence from school found Lacey’s body in his apartment. The mystery surrounding his death, says Lacey’s family, is trumped only by the way local police have handled the case.

Trying to extract redress from Japan’s criminal justice system can be an exercise in the absurd for anyone. But add in the suspicion that’s associated with a foreign face or name, and that absurdity can turn into dismay and outrage. Many non-Japanese say their crime reports are routinely dismissed by police, who may instead turn a suspicious eye on them for daring to complain about being victims. At best, police negligence can underscore a foreigners’ second-class status; at worst, it can lead to an atmosphere where crimes against gaijin are tacitly condoned.

After getting that fateful call while visiting his hometown of Poughkeepsie, NY, Lacey’s brother Charles, a college lecturer in Nagoya, says police told him the death was likely due to diarrhea and dehydration. When Charles arrived a few days later, that finding was revised to “an accidental fall in the kitchen,” which due to Matt’s “abnormally thin skull,” killed him. Yet his body had been found sprawled on a futon in his shuttered bedroom.

In the months that followed, Lacey did his own detective work. After all, he says, police told him that if he wanted them to dig deeper, he was on his own. To date, he is no closer to learning more about how or why his brother died. What he has learned is that in contrast to the police’s initial findings, Matt’s body was found with his head surrounded in what was likely a pool of blood; there was a hard-to-miss “egg-size” lump that accompanied the 20cm-long crack on his skull; the medical examiner who did the autopsy rejects the police’s “thin-skull” theory; counter to police assertions, neighbors said they had not been questioned; and the medical examiner said police were not present for the examination.

“I’m not sure if they initially suspected my brother died from a fractured skull, but once the facts became clear, it should have been investigated rigorously,” Lacey says. He has since enlisted the aid of the US Consulate in Fukuoka, the American Embassy in Tokyo, and two US forensic experts. He’s also considering hiring a private investigator to uncover whether there was any foul play behind the death, even though police insisted to media in February that it was an accident. “They continued to put the onus on me,” Lacey says of his dealings with Fukuoka police. “They said, ‘We don’t speak English,’ and any information I could find they’d be happy to listen to. They were asking me to do their work.”

To be fair, such treatment is hardly restricted to foreigners. When Saitama police snubbed pleas from 21-year-old Shiori Ino about a stalker who later murdered her in 1999 (then covered up their blunder), it showed that law enforcement is often neglectful of the people they should be helping. In recent years, such scandals have lead to reforms of how police treat victims and their complaints. But as vigilance has increased, so too has the nation’s “foreign crime” drama, in which gaijin are typecast as perpetrators.

This raises the question of whether cases such as Matt Lacey’s are victims of Keystone Kops or anti-foreigner discrimination. Charles Lacey, who says he’s seen his fair share of malicious police acts in New York City, believes his brother’s case “boils down to police negligence.” But others say that this isn’t always the case. From reporting simple nuisances to serious crimes—whether committed against themselves or others—many foreigners say police, as well as courts, send a clear message: gaijin need not bother to seek justice.

For Chad and Keiko Edwards of Kurashiki, Okayama Prefecture, that realization came on the back of a shaggy dog’s incessant late-night barking. Unable to endure the racket and the owner’s ambivalence, they sought solace from local law enforcement. “When the officer asked for and heard our last name [over the phone], his manner changed completely,” recounts the husband. “‘Eh? Gaijin ka?’ he said.” In the end, a heated rebuttal and follow-up call to the cop’s supervisor proved far less helpful than a six-pack of beer did for the dog’s owner.

Far more ominous is the account of a couple in Urayasu, Chiba, who wish to remain anonymous. When they phoned the police last year to report that the foreign-born husband witnessed a man beaten by three attackers and thrown into a black van, which then sped away, police abruptly lost interest after hearing his name. “What I don’t get,” the man says, “is two nights later, at about 8 o’clock, in front of the apartment were I’ve lived for four years, police showed up to interrupt my perfectly civil conversation with another black man to tell us to move on because a neighbor had called to complain. But if I call about a guy who’s probably at the bottom of the Bay by now, they’re not interested.”

Others, like Nancy Tittersall, whose worry that her broken window was an attempted burglary was dismissed by the same police department that later harassed her, demanding she show ID, wonders why the authorities “make me feel as if I was part of the problem, rather than a victim.”

The answer is quite simple, says Sapporo-based anti-discrimination activist Debito Arudou, on a recent speaking tour in Tokyo.

“I don’t think police have gotten around to seeing foreigners as potential victims—only as potential perpetrators. I’m building a case based on anecdotes that show that [foreign] people feel they are not getting adequate police protection. First, I’ve heard several stories of people having chimpira (young yakuza) pick fights with them, getting beat up, then being taken to the police station and not being allowed to leave until they sign an agreement to pay restitution. Second, people are asking police for assistance—like walking in a police box for directions—and being asked to show their gaijin card.”

Negative perceptions of foreigners by the police and public is a reality in Japan, just as it is elsewhere, says H. Richard Friman, director of the Institute for Transnational Justice and a political science professor at Wisconsin’s Marquette University. But in Japan, he notes in an email interview, the situation is exacerbated by several factors, not least of which is “the willingness of political officials to play the ‘crime-by-foreigners’ card for political gain… Japanese aggregate crime data rarely specifies the victim of the crime, and anecdotal evidence… tends to stress those cases where Japanese are victims, or high profile cases of foreigner-on-foreigner violence. Thus, the common image is that Japanese especially are at risk.”

Despite efforts by the police and other agencies to improve understandings of foreign language and culture, the topic of foreigners and crime continues to pose special challenges. Police training remains limited, as does broader language support in the criminal justice process.” But not everyone agrees.

Hyogo-based activist Michael H. Fox admits the scarcity of crime-victim data is suspicious, especially as it relates to foreigners. But he has a different take on the overall problem. Fox spends his spare time fighting police malfeasance, especially wrongful arrests, and he goes as far as to call police “the biggest criminals in the country.” But as for whom they target, he says, “I don’t think foreigners have a particular problem. I work mostly with Japanese, and they are treated horribly.”

Tell that to Steve Christie, an adjunct professor who left Berkeley, California, for Tokyo 12 years ago. Christie says his estranged wife abducted his then 10-year-old son almost a year and a half ago—despite an agreement not to take the child from the parent he was with, as well as other Japanese legal documents that include his son’s written wishes. Japan, which snubs the Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction, is drawing increasing international attention for practices deemed detrimental to children and non-Japanese parents alike.

Christie says his wife took his son, who was living with him at the time, out for dinner and never returned. When he sought help from police, his report was dismissed. Three days later, he tracked his wife down at her new residence in Shibuya. Accompanied by a friend who served as photographer and witness, Christie arrived in time to see his wife, her parents and a burly Japanese man preparing to leave with his son.

He says he was repeatedly assaulted by the man—to the point of having his head driven into a concrete wall—for asking what was going on. At one point, his friend, who did not otherwise intervene, picked up the cellphone that fell from the man’s pocket and put it on a ledge for safekeeping. When police arrived (above), they ignored the paperwork Christie says he brought as evidence of custody rights, and instead took him, his wife and both of their friends to the police station. His request to have his bleeding head treated at a hospital was ignored. At the station, Christie says police served a peculiar brand of justice. “They said, ‘If you persist in your complaint of assault and battery, we’re going to arrest you for stealing [his accused assailant’s] cellphone—and here I am with my head bleeding.

“I think the primary reason for taking me to the police station was to remove me from the scene so my wife’s parents could abduct my son,” says Christie, who along with his lawyer will appear in a documentary about child abductions. Similar to many others in custody disputes with Japanese, Christie says he has spent just one hour with his son —in court—as legal proceedings plod on and allow his wife to keep their son in a secret location. “In Japan, it’s institutionalized racism against foreigners,” he says. “It’s not just law enforcement but also the judicial branch. The courts say they’re operating in the best interest of the child, but they’re not.”

The same can be said of how police treat foreigners victims who report a crime, but there are a few things that can be done to increase the chances of an adequate police response, according to activist Arudou. The first is to be patient and not expect a quick resoltion. “If you get flustered, it’s only going to turn the cops off,” he says. “Have everything ready for presentation. If it’s rape or robbery, have photos of the location or stolen property; if there’s a language problem, take someone with you to interpret.”

Arudou stresses that when dealing with the police, “establishing your credibility is paramount”—even if theirs may be on shaky ground.
ENDS

=======================

ADDENDUM FROM LAURIE TROST, HEAD OF THE US CITIZENS’ SERVICES SECTION OF THE US EMBASSY (FORWARDED FROM A FRIEND REGARDING A RECENT INQUIRY TO DEBITO FROM A VICTIM OF ASSAULT…)

Thank you for forwarding this. Since the American filed a report he might be able to get some funding from his state for Victim’s Assistance for his medical bills… I confirmed with Otokita-san and Itami-san that it’s better to report an assault at a Police Station rather than a koban. And yes, the police tell us the incident should be reported where it happened.

=======================

FINALLY, IF YOU ARE GOING TO DEAL WITH POLICE, ANY POLICE, ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD, GET EVERYTHING YOU NEED IN REPRODUCABLE DOCUMENT FORM (ON PAPER, DIGITALLY, ELECTRONICALLY AS BEST YOU CAN) BEFORE, DURING, AND AFTER POLICE INVESTIGATIONS. OTHERWISE YOU HAVE NO CASE. MIGHT BE TOUGH, BUT THAT’S WHAT YOU’VE GOTTA DO. MORE IN OUR UPCOMING GUIDEBOOK FOR NEWCOMERS. DEBITO

GAIJIN HANZAI: Why I believe the police were behind its publication (UPDATED)

mytest

Hi Blog. I spent the weekend writing up a 6000-word essay for publication at an academic source on the GAIJIN HANZAI Case and what it means.

I believe it is an historical event–the first time we’ve seen the “Newcomer” immigrants band together and show their muscle as an economic bloc.

I also speculate on who the publisher, “Joey H. Washington”, is.

I believe it is the police.

Hear me out.

The arguments as I present them in my essay, FYI, follow below. This is still a rough draft (and footnotes are not included for the time being), and not necessarily how it will turn out in the final version. But I think my reasoning is pretty strong. See for yourself if you agree.

(And see the whole GAIJIN HANZAI mook scanned in full at http://www.flickr.com/photos/ultraneo/sets/72157594531953574/)

Arudou Debito in Sapporo

UPDATE MARCH 16: FINALLY GOT THE ACADEMIC VERSION DONE, SHOULD BE OUT PRESENTLY. WATCH THIS BLOG. AND SINCE I INCLUDED PHOTOS IN THE ACADEMIC VERSION, IT’S A CINCH TO ADD THEM TO THIS BLOG POSTING. ADD SEVERAL THOUSAND WORDS WITH SEVERAL PICTURES, AS THEY SAY. –DEBITO

———————-

PS:  Just heard word last night–somebody found 15 GH mags on sale at bookstore Junkudo in Tenjin, Fukuoka March 2.  
He notified the shopkeeps of the issue and the books were taken off the shelves.  Eyes peeled, everyone. D

gaijinhanzaijunkudo030207.jpg
////////////// EXCERPT BEGINS  /////////////////////////

THE INVISIBLE HAND BEHIND THE MOOK

In the end, one mystery remains: Who produced this publication? The “publisher” (hakkousha) listed on the binding is a Mr “Joey H. Washington”, who does not exist. Despite repeated requests, Saka refuses to reveal his patron.

This matters, because it is clear that whoever funded this is rich and powerful. There are no advertisements whatsoever within GAIJIN HANZAI, yet, according to a source in the publishing world, it would cost at least a quarter of a million dollar US to print something of this quality and volume. Moreover, this patron is powerful enough to convince Saka, who initially agreed to appear at a luncheon press conference with the United Nations at the Foreign Correspondents Club of Japan (FCCJ) on February 26, to avoid the event 23.

Allow me to speculate. I believe the National Police Agency, or some police branch, was behind it. Here are my arguments behind that belief:

For one, I mentioned deep pockets, and what deeper pockets are there than tax monies (which the NPA, and particularly the National Public Safety Commission (kokka kouan iinkai) with their secret budgets and a clear mandate to monitor foreigner activity24 , have ample access to)?

Another clue is the degree of information and access to the police. No fewer than three articles quote the NPA or ex-police, and the last pages have masterful summaries of foreign crimes (including names and ages) that would be most easily collated by the police databases. Even Saka admitted in his abovementioned ipcdigital interview that, “We have spoken with Japanese police in order to write each article. For them this issue is serious and they have provided the data.” [Emphasis mine]. It is remarkable that the police would cooperate to this degree with Eichi Shuppan, a mid-tier pornography publisher, given the borderline illegality and threat to “public morals” (fuuki) that the sex trades pose within Japan.

Finally, the photos are a giveaway. Either the photographer has the patience of Ansel Adams and the ability to be everywhere at once, or these are police photographs and camerawork. The police feature prominently in several photographs, and given how sensitive cops are to being photographed (I have received many reports from angry photographers, who have been told by police to delete their photos on site, wondering if the NPA even the right to demand that in a public place), the photographer must be wearing an invisibility cloak.

(Make your browser window as wide as possible to see these pages side by side)

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Not to mention own a hang glider, since many of the shots are “eye in the sky”, at just the right angle to be from surveillance cameras.

ghpg23.jpgghpg22.jpg

ghpg13.jpgghpg12.jpg

These spy cameras, by the way, are proliferating throughout certain regions of Tokyo (such as Roppongi and Kabukicho) precisely because they have a high foreign population. However, in GAIJIN HANZAI, no other place in Japan is even included photographically with crowds of foreigners. Only places with police surveillance cameras. For a book cataloging foreign crime throughout Japan (and there are many other places, such as towns in Shizuoka and Gifu Prefectures, with higher percentages of foreigners), the visual focus on Tokyo is oddly convenient for the police.

Finally, there is data in this book that only the police have access to, such as a passport photo of a suspect (page 19).
ghpg19.jpg

If they are not financially behind the mook, then they are certainly supplying the data, and perhaps some of the analysis.

This would be within character of the NPA since 1999. As I have written in my book JAPANESE ONLY (Akashi Shoten Inc. 2006, pages 196-209), there was a sea change in police attitudes towards foreigners shortly after the founding of the “Policy Committee Against Internationalization (kokusaika taisaku iinkai) in May 1999. By the very title of the organization, and the policy writeup in JO pages 206-207, police would see foreigners and the internationalization they would cause as a source of crime, something to create taisaku policy against.

This policy shift was apparent less than a year later, with Tokyo Governor Ishihara’s famous “Sangokujin Speech” of April 9, 2000. Ishihara called upon the Self-Defense Forces to fill in the gaps in Japan’s police forces in the event of a natural disaster, since foreigners would unprecedentedly riot. Since then, the Tokyo Government (the current vice-governor is an ex-cop), the Koizumi Administration, the media, and local police agencies made concerted efforts to create and disperse public-service information on the threat to public safety and stability (such as “infectious diseases and terrorism “) which foreigners allegedly pose 26.

This has reached a degree where even an academic survey has reported: “[T]he Japanese public’s fear of crime is not in proportion to the likelihood of being victimized. What is different is the scale of this mismatch. While Japan has one of the lowest victimization rates, the International Crime Victim Surveys indicate that it has among the highest levels of fear of crime…”27 . The report goes on to say, “[T]he Japanese press… is presenting a partial and inaccurate picture of current crime trends.” Another academic concurs, to say that in media coverage, “crimes by foreigners were 4.87 times more likely to be covered than crimes by Japanese.”28

Given that the NPA gives regular biannual reports to the media appraising them specifically of the rise in foreign crime rates (and decline, although sometimes the Japanese media refuses to report it 29), the NPA supplying this publisher with this much information is in this author’s opinion neither unprecedented nor out of character. Not to mention that in this age of terrorism, whipping up public fear has proven a very effective measure for loosening public purse strings.30

/////////////////// EXCERPT ENDS /////////////////////////

Full essay to come…

Transcript of FCCJ luncheon w. UN’s Doudou Diene, Feb 26, 2007 (UPDATED)

mytest

Transcript of Press Conference with United Nations Special Rapporteur Doudou Diene and Debito Arudou at Foreign Correspondents Club of Japan
Feb. 26th, 2007, 12:30 to 2PM

(photo with Doudou Diene and Kevin Dobbs courtesy Kevin)
dienedobbsdebito.jpg

Note: This is an unofficial transcript with some minor editing for repetition, taken from a recording of the event. It is not an official FCCJ transcript.

PIO: Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the Foreign Correspondents Club of Japan. My name is Pio d’E,millia, and I’m moderating today. Let me introduce our guests for today’s professional luncheon.

On my right, are the uyoku, Debito Arudou, probably the first time in his life he has been called uyoku…

DEBITO: I’ve been called worse.

PIO: . . . but I’m sorry for this discrimination. And then Doudou Diene, who is the UN Rapporteur on Racism, Xenophobia and Racial Discrimination. I think it’s a good idea that we organized this without knowing that, because today, as some of you may have noticed from the wires, we have another, probably historical statement by the minister of the government, of Education, Mr. Ibuki, who stated in Nagasaki that, thanks to the homogeneous society, Japan “has always been governed by the same race.’’
Now, I think this is a good starting point for today’s debate, because I was going to ask Mr. Diene, who has a very hectic schedule this week. He’s under the invitation of several groups in Japan, namely IMADR, the bar association of Japan, the University of Osaka, and excuse me if I’ve forgotten any others. Anyway, he’s on a lecture tour. He has been invited as Rapporteur to talk on racism in Japan. But, he’s also back from two other reports that he just finished. One is about Italy, and the other is about Switzerland. So, since I see other Italian press here, I’m sure Mr. Diene will be happy to answer questions on the other side of Europe. I’m sure that we will find out we’re far from being an innocent society.

Anyway, without further ado, I will leave microphone to Arudou Debito, the very famous initiator of a historical suit called Otaru Onsen suit. I asked him to be very, very brief because, by now, everybody knows that issue and you can take nice bath in Otaru. Please update recent us on not only the issues of the onsens but that of the “Gaijin Hanzai Ura Files.’’ It’s a magazine I’ve here. It’s become a collector’s item, and is selling on E-bay for 40,000 yen. So, I’m sorry, if you didn’t get by now, you won’t get it any more, and I’m sure Arudou can explain what is behind this. Just for the record, the FCCJ Professional Activities Chairman did try to contact both the publisher and editor of this magazine. The editor seemed to be interested in coming here to make his case. He did an interview with Japan Today, but he was stopped from coming by the omnipotent publishers in Japan. So, he’s not here. Arudou, please try to fill in both sides and be very objective.

DEBITO: Hello everyone. It’s a pleasure to be back here. It’s always a pleasure. Thank you very much. First of all, I have a handout for everybody.
[DOWNLOAD THE WHOLE FCCJ HANDOUT AT https://www.debito.org/dienefccjhandout022607.doc]

It’s three pages, starting with the report to Special Rapporteur Dr. Doudou Diene, on his third trip to Japan, February 2007. These are the contents of a folder I’m going to be giving him, along with several articles and several books, including the Gaijin Hanzai file, of course. I’m not going to be focusing on this. This is for you to take home. There’s lots of information, too much to get into within 10 minutes.

So, let me go over the visuals. Take a look at the screen.
[DOWNLOAD THE WHOLE FCCJ POWERPOINT PRESENTATION AT https://www.debito.org/fccj022607.ppt]

Is anything changing? That’s what I was asked and I’m going to fill you in on a few things that might interest you. This is, for example, a Japanese Only sign in 2000. These things still exist in Japan. In fact, they’re spreading. And that’s what I’m going to make the case to you today.

All right, moving on. First of all, why does this matter? For one thing, 40,000 international marriages in Japan. In 2000, it was 30,000 marriages. It’s going up, and quite dramatically. And, children of these registered marriages do not show up as foreigners. Because they’re not foreigners, they’re Japanese citizens. Therefore, children of these marriages are coming into our society as Japanese, even though they might not necessarily look Japanese. That will make for a sea change in Japan’s future.

And, you’ll never see where they are because they are invisible statistically. Japan’s census bureau does not measure for ethnicity. If you write down your nationality, in my case “Japanese’’, there is no way for me to write that I am a Japanese with American roots. That’s a problem. You have to show ethnicity because Japan is diversifying. It is a fact, and one reason is international marriages.

And Japan needs foreigners. They are not here by accident. One reason: record low birthrates and record high lifetime expectancy. The United Nations now says Japan will soon have the largest percentage of elderly in the world. That’s old news. As of 2006, the Health Ministry says Japan’s population is actually decreasing, and will fall to 100 million in 50 years, actually 43 years. So, that means the number of foreigners who came in 2005 actually plugged the hole. We have a net annual of 50,000 foreigners per year influx. Now keep in mind that 50,000 for a minute because it’s important. Both the United Nations and the Obuchi Cabinet in 2000 said that Japan must import 600,000 workers per year.

How many are we now importing? 50,000, or less than 1/10th of what we need in order to maintain our current standard of living. That is a fact. Even our government acknowledges that. Japan is already importing workers to make up for the labor shortage and alleviate the hollowing out of domestic industries. We’re not going to let our factories go overseas. We’ll hire cheap workers, and give them trainee and researcher visas. One result of that is, between 1990 and 2007, we now have more than 300,000 Brazilians. They are now the third largest minority, and the numbers are increasing.

Given that there is this many foreigners here, more than 2 million total, without legal protections against discrimination, will foreigners want to stay in Japan and contribute? Japan’s government says we need them. So, help make it easy for them to stay. Well, let’s talk about problems with that. For example, and this isn’t a problem per say. This is Newsweek Japan from September of last year. All of these three people in the picture? They’re Japanese citizens, just like me. We are the future. Japan’s media is also talking about this as well. Look at that. Imin Rettou Nippon. Without foreigners, the Toyota system won’t work. This is the cover of Shukan Diamond, June 5th, 2004. Why is Toyota at number two in the world now? Foreigners. Cheap labor. Working for half the pay of their Japanese counterparts and no social benefits. However, Japan is the only major industrialized nation without any form of a law against racial discrimination.

And it shows. For example, the Otaru Onsens case. Pio said we all know it, so I’m going to skip it. Well, if you want information on it, here are my books, in English and in Japanese. And you can go to my website at debito.org for all the information you’ll ever need.

Let’s take a look at one case study. Who are these two here? Can I have a little bit of reaction here? An “awwww” Those are my kids, 10 years ago, maybe a little more. They were born and raised in Japan and are native speakers of Japanese and are Japanese citizens. Now look at this. They’re actually a little bit different-looking, aren’t they, even though they have the same parents –as far as I know! We went to one particular onsen in Otaru. What do you think happened? They said, “This one can’t come in.’’ Ha-ha-ha. Your daughter looks foreign. We’ll have to refuse her entry, even though she’s a Japanese citizen.

I’m summarizing the case to the bare fingertips, all the way down to the cuticles. That’s the best I can do in 10 minutes. We have another case here where I got Japanese citizenship in 2000. And there I am in front of the onsen. A nice big onsen, not a mom-and-pop place. I went back there on October 31st, and what do you think they said? Not “Take off your mask.’’ They said, “We accept that you have citizenship (I showed them proof)’’. But they said, “You don’t look Japanese, therefore in order to avoid misunderstandings, we’ll have to refuse you entry.’’

So, it’s no longer a matter of foreigner discrimination. It’s a matter of racial discrimination. They refused one of my daughters and they refused me. There’s a couple of signs there saying `Japanese Only’. Also, in Mombetsu, Wakkanai, there are signs, including in the middle of the mountains, where people say, “Russian sailors, this. . .’’ There are no Russian sailors in the middle of the mountains. Even in Sapporo. There are signs up in every language but Japanese for the 2002 World Cup. Those signs are still up today, except for the ones in Otaru. The moral of this tale is if you don’t have the legal means to stop this sort of thing, it spreads nationwide. Misawa. Akita. Tokyo. Saitama. . . here’s a few signs. Is the point becoming clear? Nagoya. Kyoto. Hamamatsu. Kurashiki. Hiroshima. Kitakyushu. Fukuoka. Okinawa. All of this information in on the website.

It’s getting worse, it’s nationwide. “Japanese Only’’ signs have been found at bathhouses, discos, stores, hotels, restaurants, karaoke lounges, pachinko parlors, ramen shops, barber shops, swimming pools, an eyeglass store, a sports store, and woman’s footbath establishment. Huh? “Japanese Women Only’’ They said they would not allow foreign women in because their feet are too big. (sounds of audience laughter) That is quote. “Because their feet are too big.’’ Give them a call, ask them.

Conclusions? It’s difficult to establish who is Japanese and who is not just by looking at their face. Which, as for “Japanese Only’’ signs, means let’s get out of the exclusivity thing. Things that happen to foreigners only affect foreigners? You’re wrong. Because of Japan’s internationalization, we’re going to have situations where even Japanese citizens get refused. A more profound conclusion is that “Japanese Only’’ signs are unconstitutional. They also violate international treaties, which Japan affected in 1996. They promised over 10 years ago to pass a law, but they never did.

These “Japanese Only’’ establishments are unconstitutional, but they are not illegal because there is no law to enforce the constitution. We took it to the streets and did what we could. The Hokkaido Shimbun agreed that refusing bathing was racial discrimination. We also took it to the courts. To summarize it, even the Supreme Court dismissed the case against the city of Otaru, saying it’s not involving any constitutional issues, which is ludicrous. It touches on article 14.

Here’s what everybody wants to know. We still have no form of law against racial discrimination in Japan. “Japanese Only’’ signs are still legal. We have official policy pushes against foreigners, and shadowy propaganda campaigns against any bill protecting their rights. For example, Shizuoka’ policy agency had a crime pamphlet in 2001. “Characteristics of Foreign Crime’’. It was put out by the police and distributed to shopkeepers. There were also NPA notices against foreign bag-snatchers and knifers. You can find such signs at bank ATMs and subways. You have a darkie guy speaking in katakana to a pure white Japanese, speaking in Japanese. So, the message is that foreigners are off-color and carry knives. These are put out by police.

Also, the NPA decided to deputize every hotel in Japan. How? If you take a look here. “Japanese legislation makes it mandatory that you, as a non-resident foreign guest, present your passport and have it photocopied. It says that all non-resident foreigners must show their passport. But the notice that the customers see is this one: “Japanese law requires that we ask every foreign guest for a passport.’’ That’s willful misinterpretation of the law. I’ve been asked for my passport even though I’m a Japanese citizen.

Now, we talked about this a minute ago. Here’s the Gaijin Underground Crime Files. It says on the cover that “everyone will be a target of foreign crime in 2007.’’ It further says, “Will we let gaijin lay waste to Japan?’’ That’s how foreigners are portrayed in this magazine. It is by Eichi Shuppan. Cheap. No advertising. The publisher is Mr. Joey H. Washington. Who is Joey H. Washington? I’ve asked, but have not gotten an answer. No advertising at all.

Who is funding this? We don’t know. There’s been no answer. Sold it in convenience stores nationwide. You can see the whole thing on-line for free at this address. Now, Pio is giving me the time thing. Gotta go. As far as the United Nations is concerned, it says that in the ICERD that “all dissemination of ideas on racial superiority, hatred, and incitement to racial discrimination shall be a declared offense punishable by law, including the financing thereof’’. A little bit more succinct is the International Convention on Civil and Political Rights which Japan affected in 1979. “Any advocacy, etc. etc.’

Moving on, let’s talk about incitement to hatred. . . “You bitches! Are gaijin really that good?’’ This is from the crime magazine. Is this a crime? Groping might be a crime, stalking might be a crime. But kissing on the street? It’s not crime. And here, they’re talking about male member size. This is not exactly friendly stuff. “Hey, nigger! Get your hands off that Japanese girl’s ass!’’ Then there is the manga, where a Chinese drowns a Japanese wife, and says, “right, that’s put paid to one of them. I wonder where they got the evidence that he smiled as he drowned this person? And to conclude it, the manga says, “Can they kill people this way, in a way that is unthinkable to Japanese? Is it just because they’re Chinese?’’ Is this encouraging brotherly love? How we doing on time, Pio? Let me cut it off there.

PIO: If you lose your job as a professor, you can go around the world and do presentations. You’re really good at presentations. Doudou Diene has been waiting for a long time. Thank you for your patience and please go ahead.

DIENE: Thank you very much. I will be brief. I very much enjoyed this encounter. Anytime I come to Tokyo, and I would like to share with you two points. One, my main observation worldwide and after my visit to Japan and my follow up visit, on the world scene, there are three points that are strongly indicated in my report. One is the increase of violence, violent acts and killings due to racism. . .[garbled] In Russia, I was there to investigate racism. People had been killed in the streets of Moscow. Second, and more serious, is what I call the democratization or legislation of racism which is expressed by two things. One, is the way the racist political platforms are slowly but deeply infiltrating the democratic system and political parties under the guise of debating illegal immigration, asylum seekers, and now terrorism. When you analyze the program of political parties in many countries, you will see the rhetorical concepts, views being banalized. But more serious than the concept of banalization, is that you’re now seeing more and more governments composed of democratic parties and extreme right parties. You have it in Denmark, Switzerland, and we’ll know by May if we have it in France.

But when you analyze it more carefully, you see that extreme right party leaders were getting into government, to the center of power, and occupying strategic posts like the Minister of Justice. They are then in a position to implement their agenda. We are witnessing this development. It is a very serious one.

More serious, but in the same dynamic, is the fact that extreme right parties are advocating a xenophobic agenda, and they are being elected because of this agenda, especially in regional parliaments. Berlin elected seven representatives of extreme right parties. In the European Parliament, the extreme right has enough seats to constitute a parliamentary group.

So, the point is democratization and banalization of racism and xenophobia. Third point is the emergence of development of the racism of the elites, especially the upper class, intellectual and political. We are seeing now more and more books and studies being published by intellectuals, like Samuel Huntingdon’s “Who are We?’’ The central point of the book was that the increasing presence of Latinos was a threat to America’s identity. You’re seeing more and more crude expressions of racism in publications by university publishers. But the racism of the elites is also expressed by the birth of uncontrolled sensitivities? One French author said Africans were undeveloped because of their penis size. He added that they should be sterilized. So, he has crossed two red lines. One is an old racial stereotype about Africans and sex, and bestiality of Africans. It was largely forgotten, but is being revived by people like this man. Why did he call for sterilization? Historically, this has been the first step to advocating genocide, because sterilization means elimination of a group. This opinion was expressed by a key member of the French public on television.

Another example, also in France, [garbled] a local politician said there were too many black people on the French national soccer team, and that there should be more white people. It was a member of the Socialist Party, not an extreme right-wing party that said this. I provide these examples to show that we are seeing these statements by a growing number of elites.

You may ask why. I think that from this racism of the elites, which is coming strongly. . . because of the banalization, the opening of the door, anti-Semitism and racism are now coming back, being legitimized, despite very strong opposition in Europe. My role is not to denounce or to only present a dark picture of racism worldwide but also to share with the international community and the UN General Assembly the attempts to understand why it is happening internationally. Here, I’m trying to get something more positive. Postive in the sense that I really believe it, behind the increase of violence and killings due to racism, this verbal increase in racism by the so-called elites, I think we are witnessing something deeper, which is one of the causes of what I call a crisis of identity. The fact that in Europe, Africa, and Japan, the national identity, as it was framed by the elites, as it was put into the Constitution, disseminated through education, appeared in literature, and then in the minds and psyche of people, the national identity in the form of a nation-state is no longer conformed to the multi-cultural dynamic of societies.

The societies are becoming more pluralistic, multicultural. This trend contradicts the national identity as it was once defined, and still being promoted. It is precisely this clash which is being politically used by extreme right wing groups, penetrating the programs of political parties, whenever the issue of foreigners is concerned, especially in the debates on immigration and asylum seekers and their integration.
Indeed, if you take the debates on immigration in many countries, it’s what I call and “integration strip-tease’’. It’s a strip-tease in the sense that what governments are asking is for foreign immigrants to “undress’’ at the border. To undress their cultural, religious, and ethnic specificity. This discourse is being discussed and put into law. One discussion we here in the EU is on Turkey. Fundamentally, the issue of identity is at the core of the development of racism. The way the elites and, indeed, societies themselves, are facing their multiculturalization. The refusal to accept this reality is one of the sources of racism. It expressed by the elites because they are the ones who construct national identities, and they feel threatened. Now, what is the dynamic behind it? This means that the combat against racism and violent acts associated with racism has to be linked to the construction of truly multicultural societies, democratic, interactive, multicultural, and equal.

This point leads me to Japan. As you know, my report was submitted to the Human Rights Council and to the UN General Assembly last November. Three points on this report. One, I think there were many interesting developments after my report. The issue of racism is now a key issue here in Japan. It has been for a while. But my report has contributed in a way to help the issue be discussed. Second, my report had a very important consequence, which I’ve been advocating in all countries I visited. This is the mobilization of civil society and human rights organizations on the issue of racism. Japan has been advancing the issue, I must say. Japan’s civil society has organized around my report and created a network of minority communities and human rights organizations, and are acting by helping victims of discrimination, publishing reports, and drawing the attention of the media.

For me, this is central. Combating racism is not the exclusive domain of government. Civil society has to be involved and a key actor. This is happening now in Japan. The last consequence of last November’s report on Japan is that the way my report was received by the Japanese government. As you know, the initial reaction was very negative. Indeed, the Foreign Ministry told me they were not happy.
One key point the Japanese government made to the Human Rights Council in Geneva was to say that I had gone beyond my mandate in touching upon the role of history in racism. I put it as one sample point. Racism does not come from the cosmos. Racism is a historical construction. You can retrace how racism was born and developed, and how it manifests itself. This means that history is a sin for which communities have been demonized and discriminated. So, I did make that point in my report, referring to both the internal discrimination in referring to Japanese communities like the buraku community and the Ainu, and it is indeed linked to Japanese history and society. And the racism against Koreans and Chinese is part of the history of Japan from which all this racism eminated.

One of my conclusions was, beyond calling for the adoption of national legislation against racism and all forms of discrimination, I did invite the Japanese government to cooperate with regional governments like China to start cooperating on a general history of the region. And I did propose in my report, and we’ve done this elsewhere, a group of international historians to develop a report. I said that by drafting this history, it will help touch on the deeper issue of racism and discrimination against Koreans, Chinese here. Japanese may also be discriminated elsewhere. The process may lead to a more profound re-encounter and reassessment of the old linkages and legacies. I pointed out that if you read Japanese history books, the picture given of the history of Japan, China, and Korea is that of the short-term. I did say that if the Japanese government decides to teach the longer-term histories of the relations of these countries, Japanese will remember that Korea and China are the mother and father of Japan, for language and religion, and whatever else. The Japanese make it original, something Japanese. But the deeper source is more profound and comes from China and Korea, but this is forgotten. I did say that if you teach this clearly, Japanese will realize this, and realize that discrimination is occurring against Koreans and Chinese.

There is something going on in the Japanese government, I think the fact that the accepted my visit was an indication that they place the human rights issue of some importance. It is never pleasant for a government to invite a special Rapporteur. You are considered a nuisance. But, they did invite me to come, so I came. This means that, somehow, they recognize there is an issue here. I take it that sense. So, on the historical issue, after having negatively reacted in Geneva last summer to my conclusions by saying I’d gone beyond my mandate with regards to bringing up historical issues, in November, at the UN, the Japanese delegates informed the UN that the process has started of contacts between Japanese, Chinese, and Korean historians. I say excellent. But my recommendation was that this process of drafting historical revisions to get to the deep root causes of these issues should be coordinated by UNESCO, as UNESCO has done it in the past. They can give it a more objective framework, and can eliminate the political tensions which may come from this process.

So, I think this is a demonstration that something is going on. Now, in conclusion, my visit to Japan is not a one-time, final act. It is a beginning of a process for which Japanese racism will be monitored as we monitor it other countries: Russia, or my own country, Senegal. Each and every year, I will come back to the situation in Japan as follow-up. I will inform the international community of whatever developments occur, negative or positive, to bring the issue to the attention of the United Nations where it can be discussed. Tonight, there is a debate at the Japanese Bar Association from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. on racism. So, the mobilization of legal establishment to engage in the combat against racism is a fantastic step. I am now ready to answer any questions you might have. Thank you.

PIO: Thank you, and the next time you come to Japan, I hope you can meet with the Education minister, Ibuki.

DIENE: I do hope so. But I will quote him in my next report.

Q: Stefano XXXX, Italian Daily News [garbled] What were your findings in Europe and Italy, especially compared to Japan? For Debito, I have a question. There is no way to raise the interest of my foreign desk editor in the magazine you mentioned (Gaijin Hanzai File) because they will say, “Well, it’s not on the front page of the Yomiuri Shimbun’’. Why is it important to raise this issue, even if there are, in other countries, garbage press saying some bad things, especially in Europe?

DIENE: On Italy, I visited Italy in October. My demand to visit Italy dated from a year and a half ago when Berlisconi was Prime Minister. I was concerned of the policies I’d been informed of and wanted to check the reality with the new government. In my report, I formulated three recommendations and conclusions. One, racism is not a profound reality in Italy.

But, my second conclusion was that there was a dynamic of racism and xenophobia. There is no deeply-rooted racism. At least I did not find it in my investigations. But there is dynamic of racism caused by two developments. One is the legacy of the previous government. The government was composed of democratic parties and extreme right parties.

This agenda influenced the previous government’s policies towards immigration and was translated into law. That government, by their policies and programs, have created this dynamic. The second reason was that Italy was confronted in the past few years with a very dramatic migration and immigration process. You know, all of these boats coming from Africa, north and south. The dying of hundreds on the sea, and camps being established in Italy and Sicily, and these were shown in the media every day. Certainly, showing this in the media every day had an impact. Lastly, the political manipulation by the extreme right parties and Italy was also facing an identity crisis because the national identity of Italy is no longer framed to the process of multiculturalization. This created a tension. There is a dynamic. If it is not checked, racism will become rooted in Italy. So these are my main conclusions.

DEBITO: All right. I think the root of your question is, what is the peg for the Italian press? If it’s not on the cover of the Yomiuri, who cares? Well, why should you let the Yomiuri decide what you report in Italy? That seems illogical to me to begin with.

You’re looking for a peg? Here’s your peg: we got the book off the shelves. That book right there is a screed. You think it’s only going to affect non-Japanese? Well, it’s going to affect Japanese, too. We’re talking about the incipient racist reaction to Japan’s internationalizing society. That is news, and it’s not reported on enough. Look, the fact that we got the book off the shelves is pretty remarkable. I mean, as I wrote in my rebuttal to Mr. Saka when he said, “Hey, we just published this because it’s freedom of speech about a taboo subject’’. Wrong.

As I wrote here, it’s not like this is a fair fight. We don’t have an entire publishing house at our disposal with access to every convenience store in Japan so we can publish a rebuttal side-by-side. And the fact that the Japanese press has completely ignored this issue is indicative of how stacked the domestic debate is against us. You think the domestic press is going to go to bat for us and naturally restore balance to the national debate on foreign crime and on internationalization? The domestic press completely ignored this. There’s a reason for that. Real, naked racism is not something that people want to discuss. The fact that we actually stood up for ourselves and said, “Look, we might be foreigners but we do count. We do have money.’’ Myself, I said that, OK, I’m not a foreigner but this kind of thing is going to affect me, too.

And we’re going to exercise the only invaluable right we have in this country: the right where to spend our money. If you sell it at this place, we’re not going to buy anything at this place. Take it off your shelves. We actually took the book off the shelves, and said, “Look, it says `nigger’ here. Look, it shows Chinese killing people and smiling about it. This is gutter press. Do you really want to sell this sort of thing?’’ And they said, “No, we don’t really.’’ And every single place eventually took it off the shelves. This happened only because the strength of our conviction. The press didn’t shame anybody into doing that. We did that. That’s news, because we count now. We are not going to be ignored. We’re going to stand up for ourselves. And that, I think, is a peg.

PIO: The problem is the peg is now sold on e-bay for 40,000 yen. But, OK.

Q: My name is {garbled} I’m from the economic and political weekly of India. I have two questions, one for Dr. Diene and one for Mr. Arudou. For Dr. Diene: do you think your report will have any reprocussions on Japan entering the Security Council? Or should it have any reprocussions on Japan’s entry? Can a nation that practices racism so avidly be a member of the Security Council? For Mr. Arudou, I’ve followed your efforts. I believe the legal route is one route to go in attacking this problem. The other way is hitting them in the pocketbook. Japanese are great exporters of their tourist sites, and there is nothing like the Japanese tourist industry. How should we hit them there?

DEBITO: We meaning who?

Q: Us, and the press. Because I think that once you have frontally faced them through the press. There are a lot of cyberworkers from India who come here. I think we can do something by petitioning the Indian government through our journals and writings.

DIENE: On the first question. It was raised the last time I was here. I did say it was a very dangerous question for me to answer. The Japanese government is going to monitor my answer very closely. But I will give you my reading of it. I don’t think that the existence and the relative presence of racism should be one of the criteria for a country to get to the Security Council when racism is not an official policy or position of the government in question. Indeed, I did not say anywhere in my report that racism is the official policy of the [Japanese] government. This is contrary to South African apartheid. If the simple existence of racism was one of the criteria, the Security Council would be emptied. No country would be there. What should be part of the criteria is they way the Japanese government accepts the international rules of human rights and accepts the international instruments it has signed.

And I do think, indeed, that they are doing so because they accepted my visit. Some governments don’t. For example, I’m still waiting for the Indian government to accept my visit. I’ve been waiting for two years. They told me, “come’’ but don’t touch on the [garbled]. So, the fact that the Japanese government has accepted my visit is a very positive sign. And I do think that in the coming years they are going to implement some of my recommendations. I have no guns, armies or weapons of mass destructions to make them oblige.

But my reports keep going to Human Rights Council and General Assembly. I do think we are in the process of change. I don’t want to isolate, punish, or condemn any government. Racism is a deeply rooted reality in whatever form, whatever society. It exists everywhere. My role is to contribute to its recognition and the way it is being fought. I’m interested in cooperating with Japanese government and Japanese society in helping face these deeply rooted issues. Now, just before Arudou, you touch on something that is often forgotten when combating racism, the role of tourism. People don’t realize that tourism is the most fantastic dynamic of human encounter. Tourism, the way it is practiced now, is only on the economic dimension. It’s not helping promoting a deeper human encounter and interaction. I’ve been launching a program in UNESCO, my Silk Road. We are trying to develop a new concept of intercultural tourism. Tourism should promote a more profound knowledge.

DEBITO: Thank you. I almost got what I was looking for here right now on the Internet, but the connection in this room is a little slow. To answer the question about tourism. Why is the Japanese government doing the `Yokoso Japan’ tourism campaign? Because our exports aren’t doing so hot, and our imports aren’t doing so hot and we ought to do something about our economy. So, let’s bring in more tourists. Well, what are you doing to make it a bit more welcoming? That’s what they want. Well, what about those “Japanese Only’’ signs that are up? What about the fact that every time you check into a hotel you’re going to be treated like a criminal?

The Japanese embassy in Washington is telling foreigners they’ll have their passports checked when the check into a hotel for “effective control of infectious diseases and terrorism”(audience laughter). Now, infectious diseases? Japanese don’t carry infectious diseases, do they? Of course not. And terrorism? The biggest terrorist attacks we’ve had in this country have all been carried out by Japanese. There’s an air of hypocrisy in saying “come here, we’ll take your money. But we’re not going to welcome you in the same standard you’d be welcomed overseas.

DIENE: Just to contradict a little bit my friend Arudou. On the issue of passports and checking in at hotels. As an African, I travel quite a bit and in most of the countries I visited, I’ve been asked the same question. Not only at the border but also at the hotel. Since 9/11, it has become a general reality that a foreigner is suspect. When the foreigner is ethnically or religiously different, he is more suspect. This is the reality.

DEBITO: Just a caveat, though. As I said earlier, they are corrupting the law to say all foreigners must show their passports. That is against the law and should be pointed out. It’s happening in Japan to all foreigners.

PIO: I sympathize with you. Because even Italy checks with Italian citizens in hotels.

Q: My name is Lewis Carlet from the National Union of General Workers and I’d like to follow up on the gentleman from the Italian press about his comment that it’s not front-page news on the Yomiuri. I’d like to point out that, between January 30th and Feb. 6th, Asahi Shimbun ran a series called “Africans of Kabuki-cho’’. Several articles, though not quite as vicious as the magazine we saw up on the screen, portrayed stereotypical images of Africans as criminals, that they only marry Japanese for a visa, that they force young Japanese women into their bars. I’d like to give these articles to Doudou Diene and Debito for your reference.

Q: Yuri Nagano, freelance. I have a question for Dr. Diene. You’ve seen racism all around the world. How would you compare Japan against the United States? There’s a lot of hate crimes in the U.S., so if you could give me, in a nutshell, an idea of the differences. On a scale of 1 to 10, how bad is Japan’s racism compared to other countries, especially compared to countries with genocide, where they are killing off people?

DIENE: My position is to avoid any comparisons. Because I learned that I am mandated on something that is very complex and each country has its own specificities. There is no possibility, now, when racism is not an official policy of any government, but it is a practice that is culturally rooted.

My reports have three purposes. One, it is a contribution to society. I put what I’m told by the governments and civil societies I meet with in my report and the governments are welcome to correct the report with regard to laws I got wrong. So, my report’s first objective is to mirror society, to say that this is what I’ve seen. Is it true? That’s for you to decide. The second dimension of my report in which we try to describe the policies of the government, what kind of laws have been approved and what kinds of mechanisms have been put in place to combat racism and to describe them as precisely as possible. And to describe what the communities told me.

Internationally, my reports are a comparison between governments. When a government elsewhere reads my report on Japan, they may find a practice that interests them. They are trying to frame their policy against racism. Internally, most of my reports are part of the public debate once they are published. Like in Brazil, I issued a critical report. Racism is deeply rooted in Brazil. I expressed the strong political will of the Brazilian government to combat the problem. So, I want to help the different countries share their practices. I cannot give a scale. I try to take each case on its own reality and complexity.

Q: [garbled] Sato, a stringer for German television. I have a question for Arudou-san. According to the front page of the magazine “Gaijin Hanzai Ura File’’, it seems to rather target Korean, Chinese, maybe Arabs and those faces. I can’t see any Caucasian, so-called “gaijin’’ in Japanese. I’m interested in learning who funded the magazine and if you’re investigation uncovered them. Who are they? Also, you are American and Caucasian. . .

DEBITO: No, I’m not. I’m Japanese.

PIO: Don’t give me more information for Mr. Diene! (nervous laughter from Sato)

Q: In appearance. You enjoy kind of reverse discrimination. Do you take it as discrimination also, or do you enjoy it?

DEBITO: I’m not sure what you mean. I’m sorry. I don’t know what you mean by reverse discrimination in this situation.

Q: Well, Japanese people, I think, generally speaking, like Caucasians, so-called gaijin people.

DEBITO: Not the publishers of this magazine.

Q: Well, they have something of an inferiority complex, all very complex feelings. Sometimes, you are treated very specially. So, how do you deal with it?

PIO: She’s talking about two different types of approaches. One is against the sankokujin, as Ishihara Shintaro would say, and then the trendy gaijin.

DEBITO: Well, let’s start with “Gaijin Hanzai’’ There’s plenty of stuff in there about the so-called gaijin, or white people. That’s your definition. I don’t buy it, but even on the cover, you can see a white-looking guy. Before you comment on the contents, look at the contents please.

Now, about me getting special treatment as a Caucasian, I’m not really sure that’s the case. I generally live my life like anybody else in this society. I don’t pay attention to my own race except when it’s pointed out to me. And it is, of course, often pointed out to me. It happened yesterday when I was asked yesterday what country I was from. I said “Japan’’. That’s generally where the conversation stops because they think I’m a weirdo. But the point is still that I don’t really pay much attention to it and I don’t consider my status to be anything special, except that I’m a rare citizen. That’s the best way I can answer your question.

[ADDENDUM FROM DEBITO: In hindsight, I would have answered that even if there is differing treatment based upon race in Japan, there shouldn’t be. Race shouldn’t be an issue at all in human interaction. Also, the conversations I have about nationality with people do continue to flesh out that I am naturalized, and after that, we communicate as normal, with race or former nationality becoming a non-issue.]

Q: Bloomberg News. Mr. Diene, when you were talking about criteria for Japan entering the Security Council, you did make the distinction as to whether or not Japan has a policy of racism in the government or whether it just exists. But, just a question. How do you distinguish a pamphlet from the National Police Agency or the lack of a law outlawing discrimination, how can you distinguish that state of affairs with the government’s policy on racism? And just as a clarification. When you said that in Europe the racism comes in some way from immigration or globalization, does that also apply to Japan based on what you’ve seen?

DIENE: It’s a good question. What I meant by distinguishing government policy and social and cultural deep reality of racism in the society is to compare with the situation of South Africa’s apartheid when racism was officially advocated. Japan does not have that policy. It is true that in my work I have found institutions practicing racism. I denounce this in my reports. But whenever this reality is identified, the governments either deny it or recognize it and take steps to settle the issue. I have to look at my mandate in a long-term perspective. Getting out of racism is the permanent work of all governments.
Even the most democratic institutions have the reality of racism. Often, you find silence and invisibility contributing to racism. The invisibility factor is important to remember. In Sweden, you have five members of Parliament from immigrant community. The realities are different. I have not found any official policy of racism from the Japanese government. I’ve found many practices and manifestations, deep rooted in the history and culture of the country. It’s deep within the psyche of Japan.

Q: Edwin Karmol, Freelance. I don’t know if there are any Japanese journalists representing Japanese media here, but there weren’t any questions asked. It’s even more surprising that you don’t get front-page coverage.

DIENE: I must say that the issue was raised when I came, just a few months ago. I would have liked to have been invited by the Japanese press. But, at the end of my visit, I did meet the Japanese press at a university. There was a press conference and they came. Indeed, I had an interview from the Asahi Shimbun. But, certainly, I profoundly regret. I am not just down from the cosmos. I come based on the international convents a country has signed. Indeed, my work is ineffective if the society is not informed of my visit. If the media is not reflecting on my visit known. . . In other countries, the first thing I do –I did not do this in Japan –but I organize a press conference to say I’m here for this and this. So, the public will not. At the end of my visit, I have a press conference. And I do regret that here in Japan such coverage didn’t come. But I think it may come.

PIO: Have you ever asked, formally, the Nihon Shimbun Kyokai for a press conference?

DIENE: No, I usually don’t ask. I usually don’t ask. I let the media freely decide if they want to invite me.

PIO: Well, we can do a swap with the Kyokai. We’ll give them Diene and we can get Bush or Chirac. Thank you very much.

dienedobbsdebito.jpg

(photo with Doudou Diene and Kevin Dobbs courtesy Kevin–click on image to see whole photo, not just me. Sorry, could not create thumbnail)

[ends]

J Times on GAIJIN HANZAI, finally

mytest

Hi Blog. Japan Times finally got to doing a story on the GAIJIN HANZAI Magazine. Fortunately, it’s probably the best article I’ve seen on it. Includes actual statistics of magazines sold and sent back (Family Mart, interestingly enough, was entrusted with about half the copies printed), and crime statistics debunking the book’s claims. Thanks Masami. Debito in Sapporo

////////////////////////////////////////

[photo caption]
This is the cover of Kyogaku no Gaijin Hanzai Ura Fairu (Shocking Foreigner
Crime: the Underground File), a special-edition magazine published by
Tokyo-based Eichi that has triggered public outrage and caused Family Mart
to call it discriminatory and pull it off the shelves.

FAMILY MART CANS SALES
Mag on foreigner crimes not racist: editor
By MASAMI ITO Staff writer
The Japan Times: Friday, Feb. 23, 2007

http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/nn20070223f1.html

“Now!! Bad foreigners are devouring Japan,” screams the warning, surrounded
by gruesome caricatures of foreigners who look like savages, with blood red
eyes and evil faces.

The subtitle along the bottom of special edition magazine Kyogaku no Gaijin
Hanzai Ura Fairu (Shocking Foreigner Crime: the Underground File) asks, “Are
we allowing foreigners to devastate Japan?” with a tiny qualifier “some” on
the first kanji.

The 125-page single edition is about crimes committed by non-Japanese.

The pages are filled with crime stories and photographs of alleged crimes
being committed, drug deals, stabbings, gang fights and arrests — all of
them involving people from a wide range of countries. Some of the
nationalities named are Iranian, Chinese, South Korean, Brazilian and
Nigerian.

A spokesman for Family Mart, the main distributor, said that two days after
the magazine was released at the end of January, it began receiving e-mail
complaints.

According to a leaflet circulated by a group of protesters, the magazine
“gives discriminatory statements and images about non-Japanese residents of
Japan.”

After receiving more than 10 complaints, Family Mart took a closer look at
the magazine.

“When we read it, we found some expressions to be discriminatory and decided
to stop selling the book,” said the spokesman, who spoke on condition of
anonymity.

On Feb. 5, the firm ordered all its 6,800 outlets nationwide to remove the
magazine from the shelves and shipped them back to Eichi. It said that of
the 15,000 copies in stock — of the 20,000 to 30,000 that had been printed
— 1,000 were sold.

Shigeki Saka, editor of the magazine, claimed Eichi did not intend to
discriminate against foreigners but wanted to provide an opportunity for
“discussion” about the issue.

“This book was not originally published for foreign readers,” Saka said. “It
was to raise the issue (of crimes committed by foreigners) in Japanese
society. . . . But I believe the foreigners have the fear that they will be
viewed in the same way” as criminals.

Carlo La Porta, whole holds British and Italian citizenship and has lived in
Tokyo for 16 years, said he thought the magazine painted foreigners as
criminals.

The magazine “brings a problem into focus without adding perspective to it,
and as such implies that foreigners at large commit a lot of crimes,” La
Porta said.

Although the headline of a feature interview with a former Metropolitan
Police Department investigator, on the magazine cover, says, “In 2007,
anyone could be [sic–the Japanese says “ni naru”, will be, not “ni nareru” could be]
the target of foreigner crime!!” the number of crimes
committed by non-Japanese has actually fallen recently.

According to a report on organized crime to the National Police Agency,
18,895 foreigners were arrested in 2006, a decline of 2,283 from 2005.

In 2005, the number of foreigners arrested for serious crimes — murder,
robbery, arson and rape — fell to 396 from 421 arrests the previous year.

The 21,178 foreigners arrested in 2005 constituted only 5.5 percent of the
386,955 arrests that year.

Eichi’s Saka said he published the book despite the recent decline in
crimes, a point the magazine briefly mentions.

“The content (of the magazine) really is not intended to get rid of
foreigners nor is it extreme in tone. It is based only on facts,” Saka
claimed.

“I wanted to talk about the economic situation and environment in Japan that
has caused foreigners to commit crimes. But it does contain a little bit of
extreme expressions, for commercial purposes.”

The magazine contains several articles about the bad conditions many
foreigners work under, linking that to criminal activity.

One feature article says poor working conditions in Japan “have caused
(foreigners) to build resentment toward Japanese society and, one after
another, more people are getting involved in crimes because of the hardships
in their lives.”

On what are called “entertainment” pages, there are photographs of
foreigners and Japanese women embracing on Tokyo streets. One photo of a
black man and a Japanese woman has the caption, “Hey nigger!! Don’t touch
that Japanese woman’s ass!!”

Saka said that while he knew the term “nigger” is racist, he reckoned it
would have a different nuance written in Japanese. “We used it as street
slang, writing it in katakana. But if we had known that we would get such a
huge reaction from foreigners, we might have refrained from using it,” he
figured.

Saka said that although the book had been pulled from Family Mart, it is
still available at some bookstores and on the Internet.

Hideki Morihara, secretary general of International Movement Against All
Forms of Discrimination and Racism, said the magazine is only part of a
wider problem for which the government is partially responsible.

He said the government frequently links foreigners with the growing threat
of crimes in Japan and is creating the image that all foreigners are
potential criminals.

He cited how in 2003, the Tokyo Metropolitan Government, along with the
Immigration Bureau and the NPA, launched a campaign to cut the number of
illegal foreign residents in Japan by half within five years.

A joint statement released at the start of the campaign says “immediate
action must be taken to resolve the issue of illegal overstayers for the
safety of our country” because “the existence of some illegal overstayers
(is the source) of foreign organized crime that occurs frequently.”

Morihara also said that last year’s legislation to revise the immigration
law to enable photographing and fingerprinting of every foreigner entering
Japan gives the impression that foreigners are potential terrorists.

“It is a big mistake to think that by categorizing foreigners as dangerous,
Japan will be protected,” Morihara said.

The Japan Times: Friday, Feb. 23, 2007
ENDS

Fukuoka Now mag on Police Bike Checkpoints

mytest

Hi Blog. Yet another article on what it’s like to cycle while foreign in Japan. My first Japan Times Community Page column was on this very topic all the way back in 2002! Lightweight fare with a serious center, particularly when it comes to the cops’ apparent attitude. Courtesy of free local magazine FUKUOKA NOW. Thanks to Bert for sending a copy to me. Debito in Sapporo

=================================
GOOD COP, BORED COP? DODESHO COLUMN
FUKUOKA NOW MAGAZINE, FEBRUARY 2007

By Max
American, Radio DJ and Suspicious Bicycle Rider
http://www.fukuoka-now.com/features/article_display.php?fn_code=482112

One of the great advantages of life in Japan is the safety we come to take for granted. I learned recently that the downside of this appears to be a police force bored enough to look for trouble where it does not lie. Allow me to be specific; I was waiting on my bicycle at a red light in Tenjin recently when I was stopped by three cops. They asked me where I got the mama-chari (grandma-style bicycle – a friend’s old one bought at a recycle shop), took my gaijin card, asked me to get off, and radioed in the bike’s details. Apparently, either the bike or the gaijin was suspicious, and I was asked to accompany them to the police station on Oyafuko-dori. There, we were met by two older cops, twice as heavy-set and three times as surly as their subordinates.

I was questioned for a further half an hour as they took down all my information (including work and cell phone numbers) and asked me such hard-hitting and revealing questions as “Well, what will you do if we find the real owner of this bike?” Eventually, they let both this dodgy gaijin and his suspect wheels go, with the caveat that they “would be in touch.”

I asked around and a significant percent – anecdotally, it seems the majority – of Fukuoka’s foreigners have had a run in with the bicycle cops: the man asked to come out of the crowd of similarly bike-riding Japanese to be questioned; the woman stopped at a checkpoint whose bike was obviously her own but was asked nonetheless to step aside and give her information; or the fellow whose bike was checked but whose Japanese girlfriend’s bike, right next to him, was not. All true and recent stories. The police, it seems, have a tacit policy of checking foreigners’ bikes, which is to say they have a policy of checking on foreigners and using bikes as the excuse. As I waited at the light, my only fault was being foreign, and therefore suspicious. I realized that I had no idea what my rights were as a foreign resident here, and did a little research. My internet search on police policy took me to the homepage of one Arudou Debito, an American-born, Japanese-naturalized self-styled human-rights activist. Born David Aldwinckle, he had to change his name to kanji to become a Japanese citizen. According to Arudou, in May 1999 the National Police Agency founded the Kokusaika Taisaku Iinkai (Policy-making Committee Against Internationalization), specifically designed to root out “foreign crime” as a consequence of internationalization. It seems its policies, combined with the mythical foreign crime wave, have led to a more aggressive checking of gaikokujin.

The increase in foreign crime is fact; in 2003 it topped the 40,000 mark for the first time in history – an increase of 16.9% from the previous year. Those figures, combined with the horrific murder of a Fukuoka family by foreigners, galvanized public opinion about foreign crime. A closer look at the statistics reveals that considering the increasing size of the foreign community and increasing indigenous crime rate, Westerners are about 10 times less likely to commit a crime than Japanese. See www.jref.com/society for more. According to Debito’s homepage, cops aren’t allowed to question you unless you’re directly suspected of criminal activity, or are a suspicious person (Kyodou Fushin Sha). You are, however, required to carry your foreign resident’s card at all times, and the police can ask to see it. If you feel that you are being treated unfairly, however, it is legal to ask to see, and take down, the officer’s ID before giving your information. Also, the police can’t actually make you go to the station without officially arresting you. Don’t give them cause to do so though; after they do all bets are off (Japan has no habeas corpus statute). While Debito’s views are often criticized as being counterproductive or inflammatory, he makes some interesting points which you can check out for yourself at www.debito.org.

As a long term resident you get used to brushing off comments about how well you use chopsticks or how small your head is, but being stopped by the police, taken to the station and questioned was an unpleasant experience. Many of us come from countries with a history (or present problem) of racism, human rights abuses, or racial profiling. Being stopped over a bicycle is about as minor an abuse of civil liberties as you can imagine, but I didn’t like the feeling of being suspect because of my ethnicity. That was interesting, and a lesson that I can take home. Japan is an amazing country, and it’s great to live in a place where you feel safe all the time… I just wish the cops weren’t so bored.

ENDS

GAIJIN HANZAI editor Saka responds on Japan Today, with my rebuttal

mytest

Hi Blog. Here we have an interesting development: The editor of the GAIJIN HANZAI URA FILES responds to his critics. A fascinating and relatively rare glimpse into the mindset of a person with a “thing” about gaijin. I post his response below, then I offer up some comment after each paragraph:

=================================
CRIME
Why I published ‘Foreigner Underground Crime File:’ Editor makes his case and responds to critics
By Shigeki Saka, Editor, Eichi Shuppan Inc

Japan Today
Friday, February 16, 2007 at 07:03 EST
Courtesy http://www.japantoday.com/jp/news/399166/all

TOKYO — Ever since publishing a magazine called “Gaijin Hanzai Ura Fairu” (Foreigner Underground Crime File) last month, I have been subject to a campaign of harassment. In particular, some emails I’ve received have been quite vicious — and have included threats to my life. I have to admit that, although the ferocity of this reaction has surprised me, the basic emotions have not.

The topic of foreigner crime is taboo in Japan, with people on both sides of the issue distorting the facts and letting their feelings get the better of them.

On the Japanese side, the “foreign criminal” is a beast who lurks everywhere and wants nothing more than to destroy Japanese people and their way of life. Whether it’s a North Korean agent kidnapping our daughters or a Chinese thief invading our homes, many Japanese are convinced that foreigners should be treated with suspicion and fear.

This attitude makes it impossible to have an informed conversation about where real foreign criminals come from, or the reason they commit their crimes. In fact, one of my goals in publishing “Gaijin Hanzai Ura Fairu” was to help begin a frank discussion of the issue.

On the other side, many foreigners consider any suggestion that they engage in lewd or criminal behavior to be an unacceptable insult. This can be seen quite clearly in the reaction our magazine elicited in the Western media, and especially in the online community. The army of bloggers who bullied FamilyMart convenience stores into removing “Gaijin Hanzai Ura Fairu” from their shelves have decided for everyone else that this book is so dangerous that it cannot be read.

Yet I wonder how many of these “puroshimin,” or “professional civilians,” have read — or even seen — the magazine. I suppose the same right to free speech they claim for themselves should not extend to those who might want to buy and read our publication.

What these people are ignoring is a simple truth: there are no lies, distortions or racist sentiments expressed in “Gaijin Hanzai Ura Fairu.” All the statistics about rising crime rates are accurate, and all the photographs show incidents that actually occurred.

For instance, it is true that on June 19, 2003, three Chinese nationals murdered a Japanese family — a mother, father and two children aged 8 and 11 — and dumped their bodies into a canal in Fukushima. It’s true that Brazilians and Chinese account for over half of the crimes committed by foreigners in Japan. It’s true that American guys grope their Japanese girlfriends daily on the streets of Tokyo.

That’s not to say that some of the criticism leveled at “Gaijin Hanzai Ura Fairu” is unreasonable. Bloggers have called attention to a few of our crime scene photographs, in which we have blurred the faces of Japanese people but not those of foreigners. Let me respond by saying that, if we had covered up the foreigners’ faces, the reader wouldn’t be able to recognize them as foreign, and the illustrative power of the image would be lost.

Use of ‘niga’ doesn’t have emotive power of English word

Another criticism I have heard involves our use of the term “niga,” which appears in the caption of a photo showing a black man feeling up his Japanese girlfriend on the street. I would like to stress that this term has none of the emotive power in Japanese that the N-word does in English — and to translate it as such is unfair. Instead, “niga” is Japanese street slang, just like the language used in the other captions on the same page.

Finally, some critics point to the absence of advertisements in “Gaijin Hanzai Ura Fairu” as evidence that we are financed by a powerful and rich organization. Nothing could be further from the truth. The reason there are no ads in the magazine is because we couldn’t find any sponsors who wanted to be part of such a controversial project. However, in one way I wish we did have the backing of such an influential group: I would feel a lot safer if I could count on them for security!

Having been given this opportunity to share a message with Tokyo’s foreign community, I would like to stress three points. First, before foreigners rush to accuse me and my staff of racism, or to label our publication a typical example of Japanese xenophobia, I would ask that they consider how quick their own culture is to view the Japanese as subhuman. In World War II you labeled us “monkeys,” and in the bubble economy years, you considered us “economic predators.”

Second, as our country becomes increasingly globalized and more foreigners come here to live and work, the Japanese will be forced to confront the challenges of a pluralistic society. Only by honestly discussing this issue and all it entails can we prepare our culture for this radical change.

Finally, if we can manage to openly discuss the issue of foreign crime in Japan, we will have the opportunity to address our own problems as well. Sure, we could continue to run away from the topic and remove books from shelves, but in doing so we are losing the chance to become more self-aware. What we need to understand is that by having a conversation about violent and illegal behavior, we’re really talking about ourselves — not as “Japanese” or “foreigners,” but as human beings.

Shigeki Saka is an editor at Eichi Publishing Company in Tokyo.

============================

Now let me reprint the entire article and offer comments below each paragraph:

============================

Why I published ‘Foreigner Underground Crime File:’ Editor makes his case and responds to critics

First of all, let me thank Mr Saka for taking the trouble to respond. Most people of his ilk do not come forward with their views and hold them up to scrutiny. (The publisher himself hides behind the name “Joey H. Washington”, which is legally questionable) So I offer these comments hopefully in the same spirit with a bit less defensiveness, and hope that a constructive dialogue, which Mr Saka indicates he wants, will ensue in future.

Ever since publishing a magazine called “Gaijin Hanzai Ura Fairu” (Foreigner Underground Crime File) last month, I have been subject to a campaign of harassment. In particular, some emails I’ve received have been quite vicious — and have included threats to my life. I have to admit that, although the ferocity of this reaction has surprised me, the basic emotions have not.

Right from the start we get the underlying current of the mindset behind the response: A perpetual feeling of victimization on the part of people who threw the first stone. As if the critics are the bad guys guilty of “harassment”. Agreed, there are limits to how far criticism can go, and once there is a threat of violence the line has been crossed. But ye shall reap. You wilfully create an inflammatory book and put it on bookshelves nationwide, you will get inflammatory reactions. As an editor in the publishing world, Mr Saka should by now be used to criticism. But to cry about his own treatment in the media, after publishing something this distorted, shows a definite lack of self-reflection that will do him little good as a professional in future.

The topic of foreigner crime is taboo in Japan, with people on both sides of the issue distorting the facts and letting their feelings get the better of them.

The meaning of “taboo”, even in Japanese, means something that cannot be discussed. However, there has been much discussion about foreign crime since 2000, from Ishihara to the NPA to the tabloids to the Wide Shows to the respectable press. Not taboo at all, and for an editor to get this word so wrong in even a formal debate calls into question his qualifications as an editor and wordsmith.

As for distorting the facts, GAIJIN HANZAI does a respectable job of doing it all on it’s own (starting from the very cover, where “gaijin” are going to “devastate” Japan if we let them, and where “everyone” will be a target of “gaijin crime” this year). Saying that people on both sides are getting it wrong (even if true) is no defense, and no license to do it yourself.

On the Japanese side, the “foreign criminal” is a beast who lurks everywhere and wants nothing more than to destroy Japanese people and their way of life. Whether it’s a North Korean agent kidnapping our daughters or a Chinese thief invading our homes, many Japanese are convinced that foreigners should be treated with suspicion and fear.

I don’t want to get hung up on semantics here (as I have not seen the original interview in Japanese), but here we have the victim complex combined with the editor clearly admitting which side he’s on. “Our” side. “Our” daughters. “Our” homes. As opposed to crime affecting everybody badly, which it does. You can’t do “us” and “them” when criminals are indiscriminate sharks who treat everybody as food. Especially since almost all criminals in Japan are Japanese no matter how you fudge the “facts”.

Whether or not the foreign criminal is out to “destroy Japan” (as opposed to take advantage of it for profit motive like any other criminal regardless of nationality) feels more like a figment of Mr Saka’s active imagination. Last I heard, there are no real anti-government anarchic groups out there run by foreigners; that’s usually the domain of the Japanese radicals.

This attitude makes it impossible to have an informed conversation about where real foreign criminals come from, or the reason they commit their crimes. In fact, one of my goals in publishing “Gaijin Hanzai Ura Fairu” was to help begin a frank discussion of the issue.

This “attitude” being referred to here is not the fault of the critics, but the fault of the instigator, in this case the people who funded Mr Saka and Eichi Shuppan. By all means, let’s have an informed discussion about where crime and criminality comes from. But putting it in terms of racial and nationality paradigms certainly does not inform the discussion. Given how blunt these tools of analysis are as social science, this book generates far more heat than light.

Criminality is completely unrelated to nationality anyway. By offering no comparison to Japanese crime, there is no chance for informed conversation whatsoever since it is not grounded in any context. Which means the entire premise of your book is flawed and not on any search for the truth.

What you are getting, however, IS frank discussion. But you pass that off as “harassment”. Your positioning yourself as the victim switches off so many intellectual avenues.

On the other side, many foreigners consider any suggestion that they engage in lewd or criminal behavior to be an unacceptable insult. This can be seen quite clearly in the reaction our magazine elicited in the Western media, and especially in the online community. The army of bloggers who bullied FamilyMart convenience stores into removing “Gaijin Hanzai Ura Fairu” from their shelves have decided for everyone else that this book is so dangerous that it cannot be read.

Here we go with the victim mentality again, where an “army” of bloggers (I’m amazed the translator didn’t use the word “horde”) “bullied” innocent victim convenience stores into submission. This odd world-view assumes a) non-Japanese are that organized (Believe you me, they’re not! Unless you get their dander up like your magazine so effectively did.), and b) the convenience stores were powerless to stop them (No, the shopkeeps–and EVERY other Japanese I have shown this magazine to–reacted to your rhetoric, particularly when one showed them the pages with the interracial public displays of affection–with shame and revulsion. One didn’t even need fluency in Japanese to inform the discussion. You made our job incredibly easy for us.)

No, the shopkeeps and distributors, who apologized not out of fear or compulsion, decided for themselves that this book was offensive and not worthy of their racks. As did your advertisers, as you admit below.

Yet I wonder how many of these “puroshimin,” or “professional civilians,” have read — or even seen — the magazine. I suppose the same right to free speech they claim for themselves should not extend to those who might want to buy and read our publication.

Let’s walk through this Trojan Horse of logic. You deliberately put out a book that will aggravate a section of the Japanese population. If anyone successfully protests, you say we are censoring you. Drop the tatemae, already, and stop hiding behind pat and half-baked ideas of “free speech” when the honne is that all you want to do is sell books. And it was after people actually SAW the mook that shopkeeps followed through with sending them back.

(And for those who haven’t seen the mook, here’s the whole thing, scanned, and available for free:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/ultraneo/sets/72157594531953574/)

What these people are ignoring is a simple truth: there are no lies, distortions or racist sentiments expressed in “Gaijin Hanzai Ura Fairu.” All the statistics about rising crime rates are accurate, and all the photographs show incidents that actually occurred.

No lies, such as talking about Japanese penis size? Or that a Mr. “Joey H. Washington” published this book…? Anyway…

You fill the book with statistics, yes. But three tests of telling the truth is telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. By leaving out any mention of Japanese crime, which is, if anything, more likely to target Japanese and devastate the Japanese way of life, you leave out the whole truth. This is a distortion, which is inaccurate.

So are the statistics about rising crime rates. Many crime rates in certain sectors (and in general, according to recent news) have fallen. So have the numbers of visa overstayers EVERY YEAR since 1993. Maybe you didn’t get all that in before press time. Or maybe you just did not feel that these “facts” were convenient enough for inclusion.

For instance, it is true that on June 19, 2003, three Chinese nationals murdered a Japanese family — a mother, father and two children aged 8 and 11 — and dumped their bodies into a canal in Fukushima [SIC–It was Fukuoka]. It’s true that Brazilians and Chinese account for over half of the crimes committed by foreigners in Japan. It’s true that American guys grope their Japanese girlfriends daily on the streets of Tokyo.

For instance, it is true that a woman in Wakayama fed her neighbors poisoned curry rice. It is true that a Tokyo woman killed her husband with a wine bottle, cut him into little pieces, and threw him away with the nama gomi. It is true that a man killed a British hostess for his own sexual predilections. It is true a man killed his Dutch partner in Paris and ate her. It is true that a prostitute strangled her patron, dismembered him, and walked around town with his penis around her neck… Need I go on?

All of these criminals were Japanese. How would it feel if I were to write a book and publish it overseas saying you should never eat curry in Wakayama because Wakayama people might poison you. Or that one should never marry a Japanese woman because she might bludgeon you with a bottle and cut your prick off?

Or that a Japanese robber posing as a doctor poisoning everyone in a bank shows that Japanese are more devious than Westerners because they have to kill everyone in the building in order to get at the money? I bet there would be howls from the media and even the Japanese embassy.

And the groping thing? The Japanese government has to take measures to segregate public transportation because the “chikan” problem is so bad here. The differences between this and that is that it’s harder to photograph the same acts happening in a crowded train. And that it is consensual. Which means it is not a crime, and beyond the scope of this book.

That’s not to say that some of the criticism leveled at “Gaijin Hanzai Ura Fairu” is unreasonable. Bloggers have called attention to a few of our crime scene photographs, in which we have blurred the faces of Japanese people but not those of foreigners. Let me respond by saying that, if we had covered up the foreigners’ faces, the reader wouldn’t be able to recognize them as foreign, and the illustrative power of the image would be lost.

Another Trojan Horse of logic. No, Eichi Shuppan didn’t block out the gaijin faces because they didn’t think there would be any trouble from them, especially legally. Why not leave in the Japanese faces for more illustrative power that the situation is Japanese vs gaijin? Because you’d be slapped with a lawsuit for invasion of privacy, that’s why. Again, lose the tatemae.

Use of ‘niga’ doesn’t have emotive power of English wordAnother criticism I have heard involves our use of the term “niga,” which appears in the caption of a photo showing a black man feeling up his Japanese girlfriend on the street. I would like to stress that this term has none of the emotive power in Japanese that the N-word does in English — and to translate it as such is unfair. Instead, “niga” is Japanese street slang, just like the language used in the other captions on the same page.

You are seriously trying to argue that nigaa is not derived from the English epithet, that the Japanese streets just spontaneously came up with it to describe people with high melanin skin, or that it has no emotive connection to its root? 

I wonder who elected Mr Saka representative of all Japanese when it comes to interpreting how we feel about epithets. Every Japanese I have shown this book to (and I have shown it to thousands) has recoiled at the word (and one display to the shopkeeps gets it quickly removed from the shelves). Try saying it on Japanese television or using it in the respectable press. And try being the target of “jappu”, “nippu”, “yellow monkey”, “yellow cab” etc. anywhere in the world and see if that “street slang” defense works.

Same with the word “gaijin”, used in every situation in the book (even the title) except when citing police statistics (where the official word is “gaikokujin”, of course). Even here we translate it as “foreigner”, which is not the same word with the same emotive power either. But interpretation of epithets is less the property of the speaker, more the person being addressed. And Mr Saka’s attempt in an earlier explanation to say “this book is for a Japanese audience” (which he does not make in this essay) is a facile attempt to exclude or deligitimize the non-Japanese resident’s voice from the free and open debate he so highly prizes.

Finally, some critics point to the absence of advertisements in “Gaijin Hanzai Ura Fairu” as evidence that we are financed by a powerful and rich organization. Nothing could be further from the truth. The reason there are no ads in the magazine is because we couldn’t find any sponsors who wanted to be part of such a controversial project. However, in one way I wish we did have the backing of such an influential group: I would feel a lot safer if I could count on them for security!

I am looking forward to your next expose on the Yakuza and their methods of crime. Then I think you would have some real security concerns. A few angry letters in your email box does not a similarly life-threatening harrassment campaign make.

You still haven’t answered the question of where your funding came from. And the fact that advertisers had more sense than to be associated with your mook (and shopkeeps and distributors, once notified of the contents, also quickly washed their hands of you) should be some cause for self-reflection on your part.

Having been given this opportunity to share a message with Tokyo’s foreign community, I would like to stress three points. First, before foreigners rush to accuse me and my staff of racism, or to label our publication a typical example of Japanese xenophobia, I would ask that they consider how quick their own culture is to view the Japanese as subhuman. In World War II you labeled us “monkeys,” and in the bubble economy years, you considered us “economic predators.”

Cue victim complex again. We Japanese been done wrong (one or two generations ago, when Japanese were likewise contemporarily calling gaijin “devils”, “barbarians”, “lazy illiterates”…). So it justifies our doing wrong right back. How far back do we have to go here to justify the use of historically hateful and insulting epithets in the present day? And does Eichi Shuppan really want to sink to the level of the bigots (found in every society) who use those terms of debate?

Second, as our country becomes increasingly globalized and more foreigners come here to live and work, the Japanese will be forced to confront the challenges of a pluralistic society. Only by honestly discussing this issue and all it entails can we prepare our culture for this radical change.

Cue the possession complex again. “Our country” belongs to us too. We live here, and pay taxes and contribute to Japanese society the same as everyone else. Only by honestly dealing with the fact that Japanese social problems are not so easily blamed on foreigners, or on an internationalizing society, can we prepare “our culture” for the challenges of Japan’s future.

The operative word here is “honestly”. But thanks to books like GAIJIN HANZAI, which conflates criminality with nationality, I think that is beyond the likes of Mr Saka, Eichi Shuppan, or their anonymous patrons.

Finally, if we can manage to openly discuss the issue of foreign crime in Japan, we will have the opportunity to address our own problems as well. Sure, we could continue to run away from the topic and remove books from shelves, but in doing so we are losing the chance to become more self-aware. What we need to understand is that by having a conversation about violent and illegal behavior, we’re really talking about ourselves — not as “Japanese” or “foreigners,” but as human beings.

So why isn’t the book entitled “NINGEN HANZAI”? Because it’s not about talking about violent and illegal behavior “as human beings”. Nor about our “own problems”, but rather about “gaijin” and the evils that they do because they are gaijin. And how in some places in the book they should not be here in the first place and how we must defend ourselves from them. The problem being pointed at is not “ourselves”. It is about “them” and how they hurt “us”.

=======================

In conclusion, the reason why the mook should not go back on the shelves:

In my view, when one publishes something, there are of course limits to freedom of speech. Although Japanese laws are grey on this, the rules of thumb for most societies are you must not libel individuals with lies, maliciously promote hate and spread innuendo and fear against a people, and not wilfully incite people to panic and violence. The classic example is thou must not lie and shout “fire” in a crowded theater. But my general rule is that you must not make the debate arena inconducive to free and calm, reasoned debate.

GAIJIN HANZAI fails the test because it a) wilfully spreads hate, fear, and innuendo against a segment of the population, b) fortifies that by lacking any sort of balance in data or presentation, and c) offers sensationalized propaganda in the name of “constructive debate” (when I don’t think Mr Saka has any intention of doing anything more than selling magazines; he is on no search for the truth–only wishes to hawk wares for wareware nipponjin). Dialog is not promoted by fearmongering.

Even then, we as demonstrators never asked for the law, such as it is, to get involved. We just notified distributors of the qualms we had with this book, and they agreed that this was inappropriate material for their sales outlets. We backed that up by proposing a boycott, which is our inviolable right (probably the non-Japanese residents’ only inviolable right) to choose where to spend our money as consumers. We proposed no violence. Only the strength of our argument and conviction.

It’s not like this is a fair fight here–we do not have an entire publishing house at our disposal, with access to every convenience store in Japan, so we can publish a rebuttal side by side.  And the fact that the Japanese press has completely ignored this issue is indicative of how stacked the domestic debate arena is against us. You think the domestic press is going to go to bat for us and naturally restore balance to the national debate on foreign crime?

We did what we could, and it worked.  Especially since the tone of GAIJIN HANZAI did our work for us. You should be kicking yourself for making our job so easy.

========================

Again, I thank Mr Saka for making his ideology so plain. Ultimately, he comes off as a crybaby who sees other people going about their business, gets angry because the people there remind him of someone who teased him in grade school, then puts up posters accusing those people of ruining his neighborhood. Then wonders why people get angry at him, and accuse them of violating his freedom of expression when they pull those posters down. If this is the best argument the bigots in Japan can muster, then Japan’s imminent transition to an international, multicultural society will go smoother than expected.

Arudou Debito
Japanese citizen and full member of “our society”
Miyazaki, Kyushu
February 16, 2007
ENDS

=======================================

ADDENDUM FEB 20, 2007

Just got this from a friend. Seems like migration of labor is causing some problems with “foreign crime” in China too. So much for GAIJIN HANZAI’S speculation that Chinese somehow have more criminal tendencies. Anyway, FYI. Debito in Sapporo

South China Morning Post
Thursday, February 15, 2007
Crime-plagued Guangzhou considers foreigner database
AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE in Beijing

Updated at 11.47am:
Legislators in crime-ridden Guangzhou wanted to set up an information
database to track the activities of foreigners blamed for some of the
lawlessness, state media said on Thursday.

The proposal by 13 legislators was based on data showing a 40 per cent
increase in illegal activities by foreigners in the southern city in
2001-05, the China Daily reported.

“[Foreigners] without legal permission to live and do business in
Guangdong, and especially those who commit crimes, pose a great threat
to the province’s social security,” Yan Xiangrong, a deputy in the
Guangdong Provincial People’s Congress, told the paper.

The scheme would involve “all related governmental organisations,
including departments of foreign affairs, public security, health,
labour and social security, industry and commercial and civil affairs”,
Mr Yan said.

No other details on the plan, which was put to the Congress last week,
were given.

Guangzhou is plagued by purse-snatching motorcycle gangs and other crime
linked to its spectacular export-fuelled boom.

The crime is typically blamed on the more than three million migrant
workers drawn to the booming city but a rising number of foreigners also
have set up residence or businesses in the province.

There were 40,000 foreigners living in the province, most of them in
Guangzhou, the paper said.

Recent cases involving foreigners have included smuggling and
drug-trafficking offences, it added.

Last month, Guangzhou announced it would more than triple the number of
surveillance cameras around the city to 340,000 to help stem the crime.
ENDS

Japan Focus on public perceptions of crime in Japan

mytest

Hello Blog. Trapped in Miyazaki at the moment with a newsletter to mail out but no emailability.  Meanwhile, let me cite a marvellous article dealing with crime and crime perception in Japan.  From Japan Focus (an academic site run out of Cornell University in the US, thanks to Mark for the notification), some selective quotes:

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Crime and Punishment in Japan: From Re-integrative Shaming to Popular Punitivism    

By Thomas Ellis & Koichi HAMAI

http://www.japanfocus.org/products/details/2340 

 

SUMMARY: In the late 1990s, press coverage of police scandals in Japan provoked policy reactions so that more ‘trivial’ offences were reported, and overall crime figures rocketed. The resulting ‘myth of the collapse of secure society’ appears, in turn, to have contributed to increasingly punitive public views about offenders and sentencing in Japan.

The NPA policy shift since 2000, toward encouraging greater reporting of minor offences has produced a large increase in overall recorded violent crimes that are virtually unsolvable and this has devastated the police clear up rate. In reality, International Crime Victims Surveys show that the risk of becoming a victim (including of violent crime) between 2000 and 2004 was generally reduced, but the proportion reported to and recorded by the police increased. These surveys also show that Japan has the lowest victimization rates for robbery, sexual assault and assault with force. Further, the homicide rate, which is one of the most reliable crime statistics, shows a downward trend since the 1980s, and the clear up rate has remained consistently above 90%. However, like the public elsewhere, the Japanese public rely more on media sources for opinions on crime than they do on objective sources. As Figure 4. shows, there is no clear relationship between the trends in homicide rates and the number of press articles relating to them, again supporting a notion of moral panic.

As with most comparable nations, the Japanese public’s fear of crime is not in proportion to the likelihood of being victimized. What is different is the scale of this mismatch. While Japan has one of the lowest victimization rates, the International Crime Victim Surveys (ICVS) indicate that it has among the highest levels of fear of crime. The Japanese moral panic about crime has been extremely durable in the new millennium. Some now claim that the panic perspective has become institutionalized in Japan and that there has been collapse of the pre-existing psychological boundary dividing experience of the ordinary personal world where crime is rare, and another hyper-real world where crime is common….

However, rather than the rise in relatively trivial crimes, the press focused on homicide and violent crime, which are the types of stories with high “news value” in Japan and elsewhere.

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Rest at http://www.japanfocus.org/products/details/2340

The full version of this article was published in International Journal of the Sociology of Law (2006, Vol. 34 (3) pp.157-178.) Posted on Japan Focus on January 29, 2007.

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COMMENT:  So as this article demonstrates, the perception gap between real and imagined crime in Japan is one of the highest in the world, and the media has been helping it along.  Meanwhile, the National Police Agency zeroes in on foreign crime, since it is a softer target.  The public perception there (cf. GAIJIN HANZAI mag re Fukuoka Chinese murder) is that it is more diabolical (i.e. something Japanese would never do as heinously), more organized and terroristic (cf. Embassy of Japan in Washington DC’s website on this at http://www.us.emb-japan.go.jp/english/html/033005b.htm  –also includes mention of infectious diseases, of course exclusive to foreigners…).

And just plain unnecessary from a sociological standpoint.  For if Japanese commit crime and the rates go up, the NPA will come under fire for not doing their job.  But if foreigners commit it (in their unpredictable ways, so lay off our poor boys in blue), they shouldn’t be coming to Japan in the first place now, should they?  Zeroing in on foreign crime is a great way to open the budgetary purse strings while deflecting criticism. 

Pity the Japanese media has to play along with it too for the sake of “impact”. (cf https://www.debito.org/?p=218)  As you can see, it reassures nobody and far divorces the debate from reality.

Arudou Debito in Miyazaki

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REFERENTIAL LINKS:

POLITICAL OPPORTUNISM AND FOREIGN CRIME IN JAPAN

https://www.debito.org/opportunism.html

IHT/ASAHI DEC 14-15 2002 ON EXAGGERATIONS OF FOREIGN CRIME

https://www.debito.org/TheCommunity/ihtasahi121502.html

JAPAN TIMES JAN 13 2004 ON RACISM (genetic racial profiling) IN NPA POLICE FORENSIC SCIENCE

https://www.debito.org/japantimes011304.html

MEDIA GAIJIN HANDLING (i.e. significantly different headlines and reportage depending on which side of the linguistic fence you report to) DURING KOIZUMI’S 2003 FOREIGN CRIME PUTSCH

https://www.debito.org/foreigncrimeputsch.html

JAPAN TIMES MAY 24, 2005 ON THE “ANTI-TERRORIST” CRIME BILL (which did get passed)

https://www.debito.org/japantimes052405.html

ENDS

JT/Kyodo on foreign crime *decrease*, yet Mainichi focusses on increase

mytest

Hi Blog. So much for those (like the NPA and the GAIJIN HANZAI rags) that assert that foreign crime is on the increase. Not this time around:

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Number of crime cases involving foreign suspects down in ’06: NPA
Kyodo News/Japan Times Feb 9, 2007


http://search.japantimes.co.jp/print/nn20070209a5.html

Police took action in 40,126 criminal cases in which the perpetrator
was believed to have been a foreigner, excluding permanent residents
and members of the U.S. military, down 16.2 percent from the record
high logged the previous year, the National Police Agency said Thursday.

There was a large drop in cases of suspected theft from cars and
vending machines, which contributed to the overall decline, the NPA
said, adding that police and volunteer groups have increased street
patrols and crime-prevention programs.

The number of foreigners who are suspected of committing crimes in
Japan but have left the country reached 656 as of the end of 2006,
according to NPA statistics, which have been kept since 1980 and do
not cover permanent residents or U.S. military personnel here.

The NPA said 38 of the people who left Japan have been charged by the
authorities of their home countries at the request of Japan since
1999, including 19 Chinese, 14 South Koreans and one Japanese-Brazilian.

The number of cases of foreigners charged under the Penal Code fell
16.9 percent to 27,459 last year. , while those under other laws,
mostly related to illegal drugs, dropped 14.6 percent to 12,667 cases
and involved 18,895 suspects, down 10.8 percent.

Money-laundering up Kyodo News A record 137 cases of money-laundering
were uncovered last year, up 25 from the previous year, with the
underworld accounting for some 40 percent, the National Police Agency
said Thursday.

The NPA attributed the uptrend over the past few years to stepped-up
efforts by police to investigate mob-related money flows.

In 90 cases, suspects attempted to disguise or conceal criminal
proceeds by using the bank accounts of others, and similar means. In
46 cases, money was knowingly received from crime suspects, the agency said.

The Japan Times: Friday, Feb. 9, 2007
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Yet, as Japan Probe reports, the Japanese press (the Mainichi Shinbun, at least, notorious these days for this sort of thing) has to bend over backwards to make a sensation about foreign crime:

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http://www.japanprobe.com/?p=1124

Earlier this week, I posted a link to an article that cited statistics that showed a 16.2% decrease in crime by foreigners in the last year. Here’s how Mainichi Shinbun covered the story, as pointed out by From the inside, looking in:

For a taste of Japanese journalism, I point you to the reporting of the statistics by the Mainichi newspaper.

The Japanese version.
http://www.mainichi-msn.co.jp/shakai/jiken/news/20070208k0000e040032000c.html

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外国人犯罪:地方で増加 中部は15年前の35倍に

 昨年の来日外国人の刑法犯の検挙件数は、15年前の91年に比べ、東京都内では減少する一方で、中部地方では35.4倍、四国では21.5倍に増え、地方に拡散する傾向にあることが8日、警察庁のまとめで分かった。同庁は「東京での取り締まりが強化され、外国人の犯罪集団が地方に活動の場を求めるようになった」と分析している。

 同庁によると、昨年の来日外国人刑法犯の検挙件数は2万7459件で、全体では前年同期に比べ16.9%減少した。都道府県別の検挙件数を91年と比較すると、東京都は3802件で0.9倍と、やや減少。一方、中部地方は7716件で35.4倍に増加。四国も279件で21.5倍に増えた。このほか、北海道9.1倍▽関東地方(東京都除く)7.4倍▽東北地方6.8倍▽中国地方5.0倍▽近畿地方4.1倍▽九州1.6倍で、東京都を除いていずれも増加した。

 検挙された刑法犯のうち67.9%は2人組以上の共犯で、日本人による共犯の比率(17.5%)の約4倍になり、集団での組織的な犯罪が目立っている。また、国内で罪を犯し、昨年国外に逃亡した外国人容疑者は40人で、昨年末までに逃亡している外国人容疑者の総数は656人になった。逃亡中の容疑者の出身国別では中国291人▽ブラジル92人▽韓国、北朝鮮50人▽ペルー19人−−などだった。【遠山和彦】

毎日新聞 2007年2月8日 10時53分
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The English version.
http://mdn.mainichi-msn.co.jp/national/news/20070208p2a00m0na007000c.html

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Number of crimes committed by nonpermanent foreigners declines in Tokyo

The number of crimes committed by nonpermanent foreign nationals in 2006 declined in Tokyo, the National Police Agency (NPA) said on Thursday.
Police investigated 27,459 cases nationwide of suspected crimes allegedly committed by nonpermanent foreign nationals in 2006. The number is 16.9 percent down from the previous year.

By region, Tokyo’s figure, 3,802 cases, was 10 percent less than in 1991. But in the Chubu region of central Japan, the number stood at 7,716, a staggering 35.4 times the number of 1991.

The 279 cases in the Shikoku region shows a rise of 21.5 times that of 1991. The number for other regions such as Hokkaido, Tohoku, Chugoku, Kinki and Kyushu, all increased from 15 years ago. The number for the Kanto region actually rose if Tokyo’s figure was excluded.

The figures reflect the surge in foreigners living in areas outside of Tokyo.
“We have beefed up our efforts in Tokyo, forcing foreign criminal groups to flee to other regions,” an NPA official said.

Of the 27,459 suspected crimes, 67.9 percent were committed by groups of at least two foreigners.

In 2006, 40 foreign nationals left Japan after allegedly committing crimes, the NPA said. The number of foreign nationals who have been accused of committing crimes in Japan and of fleeing totaled 656 by the end of 2006. (Mainichi, February 8, 2007)
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JAPAN PROBE COMMENTS:

The Japanese headline reads: Foreigner Crime: Increasing in the regions (ie outside Tokyo) – Up 35-fold in the Chubu Region in 15 years

The English headline: Number of crimes committed by nonpermanent foreigners declines in Tokyo (I see they can’t even concede that it decreased on a national aggregate level)

Hmm…interesting how a sensationalist headline about rising crime by foreigners can magically “translated” into a less offensive English headline about a decrease in crime!
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I commented on Japan Probe shortly afterwards:

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Arudou Debito Says:
February 10th, 2007 at 1:09 pm

Heard this from a Mainichi reporter during my travels (he came to one of my speeches, took me out for dinner afterwards):

There was a recent crime involving two Japanese, one Chinese.

The headline (assigned by a different person than the reporter) was “Chuugokujin ra ga…” commit the crime.

When he asked the editor why this misleading headline was being created, he said the editor said:

“Inpakuto ga chigau kara”
(The impact is different.)

Yes, it certainly is. Mainichi has been receiving a lot of flak from human rights groups for its misleading headlines. Thanks for pointing them out. Debito in Wakayama
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Foreigners just can’t win, I guess. Even when the crime rate goes down… Shame that this is even happening in the most liberal of the national newspapers, the Mainichi. Debito in Kurashiki

Economist: Police Confessions & J justice

mytest

Getting back to business as usual on the blog… Thanks to David for the notification.

Given the honne in Japanese Criminal Justice System of using the Napoleonic system (presuming guilt and having the defendant to prove his innocence–which is why the Right to Remain Silent (mokuhi ken) doesn’t work in Japan), and the special investigative and interrogative powers given the Japanese police, this Economist article about the Suo movie talks about a serious social problem.

Moreover, although this is something which affects everyone, with the climate of Japanese police targeting foreigners, this is more likely to happen to you if you get taken in for questioning… Referential links also follow. Debito in Wakayama

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Japanese justice

Confess and be done with it
Feb 8th 2007 | TOKYO
From The Economist print edition
http://www.economist.com/world/asia/displaystory.cfm?story_id=8680941

PHOTO: Almost everyone accused of a crime in Japan signs a confession, guilty or not. Credit: Altamira Film

A TAXI driver in Toyama prefecture is arrested for rape and attempted rape, confesses to both crimes, is convicted after a brief trial and serves his three years in prison. Meanwhile, another man, arrested on rape charges, also confesses to the two crimes the first man was convicted for. He, too, goes to jail and serves his time. Is this a story by Jorge Luis Borges, a case of trumped-up charges from the annals of Stalinist Russia, a trick question in a Cambridge tripos? None of the above. It is a recent instance, and not an uncommon one, of the Japanese judicial system at work.

On January 26th Jinen Nagase, Japan’s justice minister, apologised for the wrongful arrest of the taxi driver and declared that an investigation would take place. After all, the suspect had an alibi, evidence that he could not have committed the crime and had denied vociferously having done so. But after the third day in detention without access to the outside world, he was persuaded to sign a confession.

With too many instances of wrongful arrest and conviction, few expect anything to come from the justice ministry’s investigation. But the spotlight has begun to shine on the practices of police interrogation as well as on the court’s presumption of guilt. More and more innocent victims of Japan’s judicial zeal are going public with grim accounts of their experiences at the hands of the police and the court system.

Now a new film about wrongful arrest by one of Japan’s most respected directors, Masayuki Suo, has just opened to critical acclaim. The movie, entitled “I Just Didn’t Do It”, is based on a true story about a young man who was accused of molesting a schoolgirl on a crowded train—and refused adamantly to sign a confession. Thanks to support from friends and family, the real-life victim finally won a retrial after two years of protesting his innocence, and is today a free man.

The film, which was premièred in America and Britain before opening in Japan, depicts how suspects, whether guilty or innocent, are brutalised by the Japanese police, and how the judges side with the prosecutors. Mr Suo argues that suspects are presumed guilty until proven innocent, and that the odds are stacked massively against them being so proven.

The statistics would seem to bear him out. Japan is unique among democratic countries in that confessions are obtained from 95% of all people arrested, and that its courts convict 99.9% of all the suspects brought before them. Prosecutors are ashamed of being involved in an acquittal and fear that losing a case will destroy their careers. Judges get promotion for the speed with which they process their case-loads. And juries do not exist, though there is talk of introducing a watered-down system called saiban-in for open-and-shut cases. Apparently, members of the public are not to be trusted with cases that might involve special knowledge. Those will still be heard and ruled on—as are all cases in Japan today—by judges alone.

Despite Article 38 of the Japanese constitution, which guarantees an accused person’s right to remain silent, the police and the prosecutors put maximum emphasis on obtaining a confession rather than building a case based on evidence. The official view is that confession is an essential first step in rehabilitating offenders. Japanese judges tend to hand down lighter sentences when confessions are accompanied by demonstrations of remorse. Even more important, prosecutors have the right to ask for lenient sentences when the accused has been especially co-operative.

It is how the police obtain these confessions that troubles human-rights activists. A suspect can be held for 48 hours without legal counsel or contact with the outside world. After that, he or she is turned over to the public prosecutor for another 24 hours of grilling. A judge can then grant a further ten days of detention, which can be renewed for another ten days.

Japan’s constitution also states that confessions obtained under compulsion, torture or threat, or after prolonged periods of detention, cannot be admitted as evidence. Yet threats and even torture are reckoned to be used widely in detention centres—especially as interrogators are not required to record their interviews. Accidental death during custody happens suspiciously often. Facing up to a possible 23 days of continuous browbeating, or worse, could persuade many wrongfully arrested people to accept their fate and sign a confession as the quickest way to put the whole sorry mess behind them.
ENDS
=======================

REFERENTIAL LINKS:

Japan Times Oct. 13, 2005: An excellent summary from the Japan Times on what’s wrong with Japan’s criminal justice system. To wit: presumption of guilt, extreme police powers of detention, jurisprudential incentives for using them, lack of transparency, records or accountability during investigation, and a successful outcome of a case hinging on arrest and conviction, not necessarily on proving guilt or innocence. This has long since reached an extreme: almost anything that goes to trial in a Japanese criminal court results in a conviction.
https://www.debito.org/japantimes102305detentions.html

What to do if you are arrested by the Japanese police:
https://www.debito.org/whattodoif.html#arrested

THE MORAL:
DO NOT CONFESS IF YOU DID NOT DO IT
OR YOU WILL GO TO JAIL
YOU GOT ME?
THE END

GAIJIN HANZAI mag endgame: “out of stock”

mytest

Hi Blog. Just a quick update. I’ve just come out of my last speech in Japanese this trip (I wanted the information to be fresh, so I left it until last night to get to it, and wound up working on my Powerpoint presentation in Japanese until 2:30 this morning), and have spent some time this afternoon unwinding along the rather pretty white beaches of Shirahama-Cho (hence the name), in Wakayama. Rich resort area, don’t see myself getting down here on my own dime anytime soon…

Anyhow, I was part of a panel discussion sponsored by the Buraku Liberation League on what the local governments can do to secure the rights of foreigners. Of course I had a lot to say (you can see the Powerpoint presentation in Japanese at https://www.debito.org/jinkenkeihatsushuukai020907.ppt) and wound up speaking a bit longer than my allotted 30 minutes (visuals invite stories and anecdotes, after all). Went very well.

One of the reasons it went so well was because of you bloggers. I want to thank you all for keeping us updated in the comments sections, with your letters to and from sellers and publishers. I was able to cite them in real time (the conference room had internet access, and as other people also suffered from logorhhea, I was able to read back mail, prune spam, and cut and paste your data onto projectable flips). When closing comments came up, I projected the letter from mag publisher Eichi Shuppan (thanks Simon) saying that they are no longer selling the magazine, and would be recalling it from stores. (https://www.debito.org/?p=215#comment-1147) Even Eichi’s website confirms that it’s “sold out”.

Sure enough, I have stopped by every convenience store I’ve come across on this trip (there are two FamilyMarts here in Shirahama alone), and the book is not in stock. Haven’t found it since I left Hokkaido. Other comments from you bloggers (see related blog entries) say that there are some stray issues floating around, but that other sellers are giving answers to your letters that are proactive and cooperative. Amazon remains the lone holdout (I have a feeling they would sell asbestos if it wasn’t illegal), but that shouldn’t matter as long as Eichi is suspending sales. Bravo, everybody. Well done.

One issue raised in our panel discussion today was whether boycotts are effective or the right course of action. I of course argued in the affirmative. Clearly, according to publisher Mr Sata, the creators of this trash did not expect us to be able to read it, and Sata was forced to fall back on the basic typical intellectual chauvinism of “our language, our rules” to demean and exclude “foreign comment” or feeling from the nationwide debate he apparently so highly prizes. What he didn’t count on was that non-Japanese residents, as customers, have the power of the pocketbook.

This is where a boycott comes in. If we don’t do something, anything, especially through our fundamental (and basically only) inviolable right in Japan to choose as customers where to spend our money, we as international residents are going to be walked all over again and again because the perception (held even by many within our ranks) that we are guests or we simply don’t count. Wrong. And we proved that conclusively in less than two weeks.

Given that this magazine cost probably a quarter-million dollars US to produce, I have the feeling somebody really took a bath on this issue. Should think they’ll think twice before publishing hateful crap like this again.

Somosomo, we aren’t going to make ourselves count if we don’t stand up for ourselves. We did, admirably. I want to thank James at JAPAN PROBE for spearheading this movement, and Steve for making it so easy for us to get the information promptly and right before I started travelling. Everywhere I have shown this magazine there have been gasps of disgust. And that’s the Japanese audiences. Good. That’s how it should be.

Treat yourselves to a nice dinner tonight, everyone. You’ve earned it.

Arudou Debito in Shirahama, Wakayama-ken

Japan Probe: GAIJIN HANZAI publisher Saka responds

mytest

Briefly:

JAPAN PROBE reports the overseas press is calling the publisher of GAIJIN HANZAI Mook, and cracks are starting to show in the logic:

http://www.japanprobe.com/?p=1109

Very good excerpts from two news media:

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Bloomberg has published a story on the Foreigner Crime File, in which they mention Debito and Japan Probe:

Feb. 7 (Bloomberg) — FamilyMart Co., Japan’s third-largest convenience store chain, yesterday pulled a magazine on crimes committed by foreigners from store shelves, citing the publication’s “inappropriate racial expressions.’’
FamilyMart withdrew copies of “Gaijin Hanzai Ura Fairu,’’ or “Secret Foreigner Crime Files,’’ after receiving at least 10 complaints from customers since Feb. 3, Takehiko Kigure, a spokesman for Tokyo-based FamilyMart Co., said in a telephone interview yesterday. About 1000 copies of the magazine, which costs 690 yen ($5.74), were sold.

“We decided to remove it from our shelves because inappropriate racial expressions were found in the magazine,’’ Kigure said. The company removed the book from 7,500 stores in Japan yesterday.

[…]

Secret Foreigner Crime Files featured widely in Japanese blogs and other Internet forums after it appeared on FamilyMart’s shelves.

Debito Arudou, a naturalized Japanese citizen and author of “Japanese Only,’’ posted a bilingual letter for readers to take to FamilyMart stores protesting against “discriminatory statements and images about non-Japanese residents of Japan.’’

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Another blog, Japan Probe, asked readers to check that FamilyMart is complying with its pledge to remove the publication.

The Spanish Media has also picked up on the story, and they have published an interview with the publisher of the magazine. Here is an English translation by Julián Ortega Martínez:

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Publishing date: 7/2/2007 14:11:16
Magazine [editorial] director: “I feel I am in danger”
Shigeki Saka, director of a xenophobic magazine, receives a wave of complaints and threatening mails. Interview.
Tokyo – IPCJAPAN/Shiho Kohinata

Shigeki Saka, Eichi Shuppan’s editorial director, which published Gaijin Hanzai Ura File, a magazine accused of being xenophobic and racist, told ipcdigital.com he was conscious the magazine could arise criticism from foreigners, but he claims his intention was to lead Japanese people to discuss the increase of crimes by foreigners and the country’s internationalization.

He denied the magazine has any xenophobic sentences, claimed he’s not a racist and refused to apologize. During the dialogue with ipcdigital.com he received threatening e-mails whose content he did not want to disclose.

ipcdigital.com: What is your opinion on the reaction of the public about your magazine?

Shigeki Saka: I don’t understand it yet well. There are a lot of questions from foreign press [outlets] as Reuters or Bloomberg. I know there are a lot of complaints. But that depends on how you receive this stuff. In principle it is a magazine written in Japanese and sold in Japan. Then, it’s for Japanese people to read it. Besides, on the magazine there are not any discriminatory claims, though I imagine that foreigners who are always discriminated are a little bit more sensitive.

ipcdigital.com: What did you wanted with the approach given to the magazine?

SS: Currently Japan is facing a lot of offences starred by foreigners. There must be a why. I wanted to find that “why”. I can’t act as if nothing was actually happening. Today there are some Japanese afraid of foreigners and I wanted to survey these people’s psychology. I want you to read the magazine. You’ll see.

ipcdigital.com: And what have you discovered so far?

SS: Foreigners’ crimes in Japan have a profile which changes depending on the country and this is what I also wanted to know. For example, about Chinese and Koreans. Japan welcomes them as kenshusei and that system is officially intended to they to learn Japanese working techniques and that they take them back to their countries. But it happens that they are put to work as common employees, but with low salaries and some of them cause minor offences. The kenshushei system is the problem that has been generated by Japan. It is a problem from here.

ipcdigital.com: What are you based on to give an opinion about the crimes?

SS: We have spoken with Japanese police in order to write each article. For them this issue is serious and they have provided the data. I have also spoken with Japanese specialists, as university professors devoted to this issue. This magazine is a summary of these data and focused on the foreigners’ issue.

ipcdigital.com: Don’t you think the way the photographs are used is tendentious?

SS: If you read the magazine you will understand it. Maybe foreigners can’t read the articles in there and they only see the pictures of the discriminated. The magazine has a lot more than photographs, which is 1/4 of the total. I wanted the magazine to be read by a lot of people, so many people bought it we put shocking pictures, to call everyone’s attentiona. But I don’t want they think it’s a discriminating magazine only because of the pictures. Besides, I’m not a racist. In Japan there are a lot of contradictions and, in order to have a coexistence between different cultures we have to erase those contradictions. To solve those contradictions is one of the goals of this magazine.

ipcdigital.com: How did you get the photographs you published?

SS: There is a very special photographer. He walks the commercial districts as Roppongi, Shinjuku, Ikebukuro, and Shibuya. He’s around the city all day. He’s a freelancer. I did not ask him to take pictures of the foreigners, but he offered the ones he had to us. In the city there are a lot of foreigners, but he doesn’t go only after them.

ipcdigital.com: What do you think about Familymart’s withdrawal of the magazine?

SS: I’m sad about that. We can’t say anything else about the withdrawal of the magazine at the combini because Familymart has not communicated anything yet, they withdrew it without asking us. Normally distributors are more powerful. We can’t do anything, but I think that withdrawing it is a way to reject the debate. The magazine raises an issue to discuss. Why there are so many crimes by foreigners? What can we do? Without a magazine of that kind we can’t know the positive or negative opinion from the people. I want a discussion and I want to find the way to solve this problem. This is my other objective. But I see that the foreigners who are angry, but that’s because they’re afraid to be discriminated, that’s why they overreact. At the internet blogs I see they’re only putting the pictures and they discuss from that, I confess I’m discouraged about that. I want a discussion. Else, we will never be able to internationalize this country

ipcdigital.com: Will you apologize?

SS: Look. First, I’m receiving a lot of e-mails which seem like a joke.

ipcdigital.com: What do they say?

SS: I can’t tell you, but I feel I’m in danger. I want opinions, but most of the ones I receive are overreactions from the foreigners. Most complaints come from foreigners. I want to know the reactions of the Japanese. I must say I’m a little worried. I know there are some people bothered but if you read the magazine, you’ll see there’s no single discriminatory phrase, so I don’t know why should I apologize.
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EXCERPTS END

You can see what the problem is in my full review of the magazine, available at
https://www.debito.org/?p=214 No single discriminatory phrase? Makes me wonder if HE actually read the book.

One more article, while I’m at it. From the South China Morning Post:

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JAPAN: Magazine’s focus on crimes by foreigners sparks outrage
Graphic collage of foreigners’ crimes touches on Japanese xenophobia, say rights groups

South China Morning Post
Wednesday, February 7, 2007
By Julian Ryall
http://www.asiamedia.ucla.edu/article-eastasia.asp?parentid=63195

A lurid “true-crime” magazine that depicts foreigners as red-eyed criminals bent on causing mayhem in Japan has been criticised by a rights group as “ignorant propaganda” which will increase intolerance towards people from other countries.

Secret Files of Foreigners’ Crimes went on sale across Japan on January 31, according to Eichi Publishing, but quickly caused outrage with its garish depictions of Chinese, Koreans, Iranians and US military personnel.

Eichi is an otherwise unremarkable publisher which also publishes mainstream magazines, including hobby and movie magazines, as well as some soft-core pornography.

The one-off, glossy 128-page magazine, which sells for 690 yen (HK$45), includes graphic, manga-style comic strips retelling the story of the murder of a family of four by three Chinese nationals in 2003, grainy pictures of a police raid on a brothel, images of off-duty American soldiers in a street scuffle, and shots of foreigners holding hands with Japanese women under the headline, “Yellow cab real street photo”.

One is captioned “Hey nigger! Get your f****** hands off that Japanese lady’s ass!” Another reads: “This is Japan! Go back to your own f****** country and do that!”

“It’s disgusting,” said US-born Debito Arudou, a naturalised Japanese who campaigns for foreigners’ rights. “It’s fallacious, baiting, ignorant propaganda from cover to cover.

“It focuses exclusively on the bad things that some foreigners do, but has absolutely nothing about crimes committed by Japanese,” he said. “Crime is not a nationality issue and they are simply equating evil crimes with evil foreigners.”

A spokeswoman for the publisher declined to comment.

The publication is on sale in bookshops and convenience stores throughout Japan, as well as through Amazon Japan, although Mr Arudou said the FamilyMart chain, with nearly 7,000 stores, had removed it yesterday morning.

Mr Arudou said conservative politicians and media were edging Japanese society to the right and heightening fear of foreigners, and a magazine such as Eichi’s bordered on incitement to racial hatred and would not be tolerated in most other societies.

One chapter of the magazine reveals the alleged tricks that foreign sex industry workers use to take advantage of drunk Japanese men – adding a dig about Korean women smelling of kimchee.

Another article is titled “City of violent degenerate foreigners”, while a map of the world gives a “danger rating” for countries, with China top of the pile, followed by Korea and Brazil.

“The publication feels like a sales pitch for keeping foreigners out of Japan, and that’s a campaign that the Japanese police began in 2000 when they began to get tougher on people from overseas,” Mr Arudou said. He pointed out that the magazine contained an interview with a former police officer and mugshots of suspects. “I get the impression the police have been co-operating with the publishers.”

According to the National Police Agency, 47,865 cases involving foreigners were solved in 2005, an increase of 737 cases from the previous year. Some 21,178 foreign suspects were arrested, down 664 in the same period.

Date Posted: 2/7/2007
===========================

Still waiting for this to catch fire domestically… here’s hoping. Will cite this in my speech tomorrow to human rights groups here in Wakayama. Bests, Debito in Shirahama

///////////////////////////////////////////////////

UPDATE MARCH 15, 2007

Here’s an article I tracked down this morning while doing research for an academic piece on this subject. Was on the road, missed it, sorry. From China’s PEOPLE’S DAILY. Surprisingly, the issue of how evil Chinese criminality was portrayed in the book was completely ignored in the article. Hm. Debito

World
Japan stores withdraw ‘foreigner crime’ book
UPDATED: 16:55, February 06, 2007
PEOPLE’S DAILY, CHINA

http://english.people.com.cn/200702/06/eng20070206_347955.html

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 yesterday.

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 foreign group.

Source: China Daily/Agencies
ENDS

Review of GAIJIN HANZAI Mag: what’s wrong with it?

mytest

Hi Blog. Had some time in train transit between Kashihara and Kyoto, so I decided to take care of some outstanding business:

GAIJIN HANZAI URA FAIRU 2007
WHAT’S WRONG WITH THE BOOK?
A VERY QUICK REVIEW
By Arudou Debito, Hirakata, Japan

To deflect the cultural relativists and naybobs who make a sport of poking holes in any argument or social movement, it’s probably a good idea to give a review of the “GAIJIN HANZAI UNDERGROUND FILES” publication. and why it’s symptomatic of so much of what is wrong about a media which has insufficient safeguards against hate speech and defamation of ethnic groups.

(And for those who haven’t seen the mook, here’s the whole thing, scanned, and available for free:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/ultraneo/sets/72157594531953574/)

The review is organized thusly:
////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
COVER
OPENING SECTION
FURTHER SECTIONS
WHY THIS BOOK IS MYSTERIOUS
WHY THIS BOOK IS SYMPTOMATIC
THE REACTIONS

////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

LET’S START WITH THE COVER

gaijinhanzaifile2007.jpg

The first impression is one which hardly needs explanation. Crazed faces of killers putting bullet holes in the cover, with classic ethnic profiles (center stage is what appears to be a slitty-eyed member of the Chinese Mafia), with a Jihadist, generic white and black people, and caricatures of both N and S Korean leadership in the very back–all coming to get you, the reader. Along with a listing of the countries covered inside (complete with flags), it advertises interviews with the National Police Agency (NPA–who will be “thoroughly” chasing down “gaijin crime”) and ex-cop and “crime expert” Kitashiba Ken (who is quoted as saying that “everyone will become a target of ‘gaijin crime’ in 2007”).

The take-home message at the bottom: “SHOULD WE LET THE GAIJIN LAY WASTE (juurin) TO JAPAN?”. As if “gaijin crime” is the main element of crime in Japan (it is not), and alarm towards hordes of gaijin is warranted.

Of course, the use of the word gaijin (a housou kinshi kotoba, or word not permitted for broadcast in the media) already shapes the debate. Whenever official stats are quoted within, they use the official word for it–“gaikokujin hanzai”. But whenever there is any analysis, “gaijin” becomes the rhetorical currency. Conclusion: From the start, there is no attempt to strike a balance or avoid targeting, alarmism, or sensationalism. The rest of the book will bear this out.

////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

OPENING SECTION: GLOSSIES OF BLOOD AND VIOLENCE ORGANIZED BY NATIONALITY

This is no exaggeration. The very first page asks the questions in the “Why do you beat your wife?” genre: “Why is gaijin crime frightening? Why is it rising? Why is it happening?…” with a collared gaijin splayed out on the sidewalk by police with the headline in blood-red, “GOKUAKU GAIJIN” (evil foreigner). “WE CANNOT ALLOW THIS TO HAPPEN!” reads the final departing thought.

The next pages develop their case for Tokyo as a “Lawless Zone” (fuhou chitai, or “dangerous zone” in katakana, just in case you missed the point), listing up the obviously anarchic areas of Shibuya, Shinjuku, and Roppongi. Often categorized by country (China, South Korea, Iran, Brazil, Philippines, black people…) and crime (stabbing, smuggling, kidnapping, attempted murder, assault, petty theft, gangland whacks, youth gangs…), it liberally interprets the scenes in an unfavorable light: A stabbing of an exchange students is questioned as a “battle between Chinese groups?”, a person found unconscious in the bar district of Roppongi, receiving medical attention from officials while gaijin and Japanese rubberneck, is interpreted as “the surrounding gaijin look as though they have no concern whatsoever”. After all, Roppongi is apparently “a city without nationality” (mukokuseki toshi–as opposed to, say, more accurately, “multicultural”?) where, as the article portrays, only the fittest survive.

One would get the impression from reading all this that the Yakuza don’t exist in Japan, and that they also do not have a long history of committing the same crimes in the same areas (if you doubt that, take a crime tour of Kabukichou with friend Mark S, who has been here for as long as I’ve been alive and has written books on Japanese crime). Ah, but you see, that would fall outside the purview of this book. This is about *FOREIGN* crime, after all. So no need to ground this in any context or give comparative statistics at any time with Japanese crime… (They don’t, in case you were wondering.)

Bonus points for the editorial tendency throughout the magazine to mosaic-over Japanese faces to mask their identity, but leave the gaijin faces intact. Gaijin are, after all, not entitled to the same rights of privacy in our country. Photo credits, by the way, are given to what looks to be a Chinese name. He must be everywhere at once, or at least as patient as Ansel Adams…

////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

FURTHER SECTIONS

give us profiles and motivations of perps based upon nationality (since naturally, their premise is that crime is committed by nationalities, not individuals).

We have an interview with an Instructor at Nihon University School of International Relations named O-izumi Youichi (who shares his insights into the general gaijin criminal mind through his studies of criminality in Spain), included to demonstrate that Japanese police and soft Japanese society don’t have the mettle to deal with more hardened foreign criminals.

A section depicting China as a breeding ground for hardened criminality (and South Korea as the same but bolstered by an extra booster of hatred for Japan). A more sympathetic section about Nikkei Brazilians (who given their hardships overseas would understandably want to re-emigrate back to the homeland–pity they’re corrupted by foreign criminality).

Something on the US military, whose crimes are “too small” (bag snatching, shoplifting, petty theft, bilking taxi drivers…) yet still cast doubt on their real ability to “keep peace in the Far East”. Something on foreign laborers in general (now 700,000 souls), with some background on their situation, but with a focus more on the apparent social damage than on their possible benefit to Japan (such as making Toyota the world’s number two automaker, for example).

Finally, the NPA are selectively quoted to make the case, naturally, that they are understaffed and need more money (which is quite possibly one major motivation for cooperating with this publication in the first place).

The bulk of the remainder of this book is devoted to developing stories beyond the visual, and into the graphic storytelling. Written by the same small number of authors (who demonstrate a clear voyeuristic tendency found in people with an extraordinary taste for the macabre), the next section leads off with a Top Ten of Foreign Crime Cases (subtitled in English, “ALIEN CRIMINAL WORST 10”–Chilean Anita, who landed her J husband in jail in Aomori for 13 years on corruption charges, is merely Number 4), and each gets a full page. The majority are murders.

Naturally, North Korea then gets its due, over six pages, where they make the case that “FOR THE DPRK, CRIME IS BUSINESS”. Then it finishes off with a lovely screed about how Japanese criminals may be taking refuge in the cruelty of foreign crime. As if foreigners are raising the bar.

============================

But the coup de grace surely belongs to a six-page manga recreating the 2003 murders of a Fukuoka family suspected of being rich by Chinese “exchange students”. After they break into the premises, they drown the wife (who is a state of undress and drawn titillatingly), then smile (and say, “Good, that’s put paid to one”) and strangle her nearby sleeping child. Then the father returns home and finds the Chinese threatening to knife his other daughter in the genkan, then strangles her in front of him. Then, when the father is unable to produce the riches they killed everyone for, he gets strangled by two Chinese pulling a rope between them taut (one puts his foot on his head for leverage). How these actions, conversations and thoughts were recreated when there were no witnesses is unclear. Finally, they are dumped in a Fukuoka harbor, weighed down with weights.

Pretty nasty stuff. But the jewel in the manga’s crown is the final caption: “Nihonjin ni wa kangaerarenai kono rifujinsa. koumo kantan ni hito ga korosareru no wa chuugokujin da kara na no ka?” “The unreasonable of this is unthinkable to Japanese. Does killing come so easily because these people are Chinese?” I guess thiis assumes that killings of this sort don’t happen between Japanese. History begs to differ.

(Then again, the editors have that base covered–if heinous crimes of this ilk occur, they are inspired by or encouraged by gaijin all over again, according to that previous essay about raising the bar. Wareware nipponjin can do no similar wrong, right?)

============================

Then we get into crime profiles of wanted criminals–two pages of gaijin killers, thieves, drug runners, smugglers, etc. All with photos, ages, body measurements, descriptions for the crimes, and phone numbers of the local police stations in charge. Like TV show America’s Most Wanted.

Two more manga follow–one with the botched kidnapping last June of a rich plastic surgeon’s daughter by two Chinese and one Japanese (only the Japanese perp is drawn with “normal” non-slitty eyes, of course). Of course, the narration only allows us to hear what goes on inside the Japanese’s head, and how he was a rather hesitant accomplice (even though at the end he’s the one with the gun to the kidnapped girl’s head, and who pulls the trigger on a jammed gun).

The other manga is about a Chinese “research” laborer working on a pig farm, and this time, for a change, we hear about the plight of the worker being exploited by nasty Japanese bosses (who are drawn like the pigs the Chinese keeps feeding at all hours of the day). It’s the most sympathetic story in the book, but the Chinese still ends up knifing his bosses. It’s an oasis with some sympathy, if anything.

But in between them is an interview with an ex-cop, Kitashiba Ken, famous for his pronouncements about law enforcement in Japan. His points (in headline): Stop illegals, Understand that “the age of internationalization” also means “the age of internationalized crime”, and that this spring there will be “an unimaginable planned organized event”–a Tet Offensive of foreign criminality, if you will?

There is another article speculating on whether Japanese society is creating foreign crime, another on crime by foreign cults (like Asahara’s, perchance?), more pages on smuggling, another on the CIA’s involvement in all this, another on foreign prostitution (focussing on the supply, not the demand, naturally), underground hospitals dealing with foreign abortions…

============================

But then we go off the scale with the most famous pages iin the book–showing gaijin and Japanese women engaging in public displays of affection and heavy petting on the street. The headlines are full of vitriol: “OI, N*****R, GET YOUR HAND OFF THAT J GIRL’S ASS!!”, “YOU B*TCH*S THINK GAIJIN ARE THAT GREAT?!!” (with subtitles about comparative size and hardness), “HEY HEY HEY, NONE OF THAT T*T RUBBING ON THE STREET!!”, and, of course, the prize-winner: “HEY HEY HEY, GET YOUR HAND OUT OF THAT GIRL’S P***Y IN PUBLIC!”

The problem here is that, given that this is all apparently consensual, none of this qualifies as a crime. It’s just an eyesore to the editors who wish they could switch places.

Next up (superimposed over a photo of a naked woman’s backside) is a story about prostitution servicing US servicemen. Then another bit on foreign copyright violators (as if Japanese industry doesn’t have a long history of engaging in widespread copying and innovation of foreign goods). And then a long section on the foreigner sex industry in Japan (again, focussing on supply, not demand). In the interest of full disclosure, the magazine provides great detail on how to deal with foreign hookers, particularly how to procure them (even market prices). And a Q&A section on “Delivery Health” Korean pros, including speculation on how their nether regions smell.

The book closes with a calendar of crime–187 cases over 2006 organized by month stretched over 12 pages. (Good thing they didn’t include Japanese crimes, since that would have made the book a lot thicker!) And a back page that says that “Gaijin Crime in Japan–47,000 cases per year. (Again, good thing they didn’t include Japanese crime…), with a world map surrounded by guns, knives, syringes, and skull-and-crossbones danger ratings for 14 countries that are “targeting Japan” (and, not mentioned, giving the overwhelming majority of domestic criminal elements some competition…)

////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

WHY THIS BOOK IS MYSTERIOUS

1) It is unclear who published it, and how it got so much shelf space in national chains. The name given, “Joey H. Washington”, is clearly a pseudonym, and books by law are apparently not allowed to be published anonymously like this. But in this current media culture, where outlets like 2-Channel can say whatever they like to a huge audience (even if it’s not true and it maliciously hurts people) with impunity.

2) There is no advertising whatsoever in the magazine. This is extremely odd because the book is printed often in full color on very fine quality paper, and runs for 130 pages. A friend who worked in the trade estimated this would run about a quarter-million dollars US for a nationwide press run. Yet it sells for 657 yen–a steal. Who is behind this? Smells like a rich and powerful patron…

3) They editors apparently thought nobody would notice. Foreigners, particularly those most often targeted for exposure, don’t read Japanese, of course. Wrong. And that’s why the reaction has been so interesting overseas. More on that in a sec.

4) This book is very well researched. The photos are incredible. It’s hard to believe that this came about without police cooperation. In fact, I don’t believe it. There is information in it that only the police are generally privy to (such as passport photos of suspects)! Another great method for the police to increase budgetary outlay–by inspiring fear in the public…?

////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

WHY THIS BOOK IS SYMPTOMATIC

Because it falls into the old fallacies that “we Japanese” rubric and faulty Japanese social science has for generations promoted. Attributing behavior to nationality, as if Chinese kill because they are Chinese (cf Gov. Ishihara’s Ethnic DNA speech to explain Chinese Crime). As if foreigners lead the way into harder crime (hardly). As if foreigners and Japanese are innately different (if foreigners are criminals, logically Japanese must not be–after all, who needs proper comparison?). And those aberrant exceptions are the results of foreign influences, not possibly sui generis…

It is a distressing tendency, not the least because it falls into a very common pattern in Japan of avoiding responsibility, and pinning the blame for your own problems (such as the general upward trend in domestic crime) on other people.

////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

THE REACTION

has been one of general revulsion all around. Blog Japan Probe led the charge for a boycott of the sellers of this mag, and some, particularly FamilyMart, have quickly decided to withdraw it from their stands (although several friends nationwide report that it is still on the shelves). Amazon.com defends the sale of the book with pat slogans of freedom of speech. The issue and developments have made AFAIK the Times London, the Guardian, IHT/Asahi, Bloomberg, Metropolis, and dozens of major blogs on Japan in the Blogosphere. I have mentioned this issue in my recent speeches (even projected some scanned images), and people have said they will be on the lookout. Meanwhile, the publisher, Eichi Shuppan, has said that this book is not racist because it is “based on established fact” (never mind interpretation or invective), and that “n****r is not an offensive word in Japan” anyway (sez who?). http://www.japantoday.com/jp/quote/2077

No doubt there will be more interesting ripples to come, particularly if the overseas press coverage boomerangs into the domestic. Let’s hope the real media watchdogs ferret out who’s really behind this and why. Meanwhile, I offer this quick review of the publication as a primer to those who cannot procure the book or read it. In haste, so sorry for any errors.

Arudou Debito
Hirakata, Japan
February 8, 2007
debito@debito.org
https://www.debito.org

REFERENTIAL LINK:
HOW THE JAPANESE POLICE AND POLICYMAKERS DISTORT FOREIGN CRIME

https://www.debito.org/foreigncrimeputsch.html
ENDS

GAIJIN HANZAI off shelves, apologies begin

mytest

Hi Blog.  Writing remotely, and have a speech to 350 people (not on this, but I might find a way to squeeze it in) coming up in a few hours, so I`ll be brief:

Looking at the crop of comments this morning (thanks very much for that–I had no internet access last night, so apologies for the delay in approving them), people forwarded us letters from retailers like Family Mart offering apologies and stating they would be pulling GAIJIN HANZAI from the shelves.  Well and good. 

(I’m not used to this computer, and don’t have time to figure out how to copy and paste links, so please tool around the comments sections of the GAIJIN HANZAI posts and find them? Some here: https://www.debito.org/?p=205#comments”>https://www.debito.org/?p=205#comments)

Also, overseas press, according to JAPAN PROBE (http://www.japanprobe.com/?p=1095), have also been reporting on the situation, and Eichi Shuppan publishers have been quoted as saying that “nigger is not an offensive word in Japan”.  Kinda like the word “gaijin”, huh?

Lastly, I finally found time last night on the plane and train to give GAIJIN HANZAI a good going-over. My initial reactions are that the magazine, despite a few sections where the authors are trying to show gaijin in a somewhat favorable light, this becomes faux given the invective.  Examples:

After showing the murders of the Fukuoka family by Chinese thieves, they conclude by saying, “Did they do this because they are Chinese?”  (No, they did this because they were murderous individuals.)  They also depict one of the killers as laughing and saying, after murdering the wife in the shower in a titillatingly-drawn scene, “That’s put paid to one of them.”  (What possible evidence could there be that he actually said that?)

In the photos of the crime scenes, all the Japanese faces are covered up.  The foreigners faces are rarely covered up.  One scene in Roppongi shows the authorities helping a downed person on the street.  The caption reads, “And the foreigners seem to show diffidence”, deliberately not covering up their faces to show how carefree they are in this “lawless zone”.  That’s completely unwarranted attribution.

Finally, I’m amazed at how good the photos are of the crime scenes.  The magazine even has a passport photo of a suspect.  These things should be hard to get.  I’m beginning to wonder whether they had any police cooperation in the production of this magazine. They have an interview with an ex-cop…

Anyway, I said I’d keep this brief. Gotta clear my head for the speech, so I’ll hopefully write a more detailed analysis of the magazine later, if this topic isn’t passe by then.

Arudou Debito
Kashihara

UPDATE EVE FEB 6 9PMJust got back from speech:  More attended than expected (about 380), sold ten books and two t-shirts.  Lovely enkai afterwards.  A bit tipsy, so excuse candor.Got calls from two reporters (South China Morning Post, for one) regarding the GAIJIN HANZAI mag before the speech.  Should be 500 words somewhere, keep an eye out.

Managed to copy four pages from the mag (hadn’t time to scan it in Hokkaido.  Friend took digital photos) and project it up for the audience today.  Lots of shockwaves.  Summary thoughts pointed out FYI:

1) THERE IS NO ADVERTISING IN THE MAGAZINE.  Given the fact that this is a very high-quality publication selling for the very reasonable price of 657 yen, it is very clear that these people have some very rich patrons financing them.

2) IT FEELS TO SOME OF THE HUMAN RIGHTS PEOPLE THAT THERE IS SOME OFFICIALDOM INVOLVED BEHIND THIS.  They have seen the likes of this before.

3) PHOTO CREDITS FROM KYODO TSUUSHIN AND THE MYSTERIOUS NITCHUU KEIZAI SHINBUN, not to mention AFP and PANA.  Curiouser and curiouser.

PHOTO CREDITS FROM KYODO TSUUSHIN AND THE MYSTERIOUS NITCHUU KEIZAI SHINBUN, not to mention AFP and PANA.  Curiouser and curiouser.Also got a call from a domestic rights activist, but was in speech mode and couldn’t answer.

PHOTO CREDITS FROM KYODO TSUUSHIN AND THE MYSTERIOUS NITCHUU KEIZAI SHINBUN, not to mention AFP and PANA.  Curiouser and curiouser.Also got a call from a domestic rights activist, but was in speech mode and couldn’t answer.Anyway, next stop Kyoto tomorrow.  Then Shiga the next day.  Keep us posted, everyone.  Thanks.  Debito in Kashihara

====================

UPDATE FEB 7 FROM HIRAKATA, KANSAI

Finally back online after two days in the wilderness, sorry. Just found out that the International Herald Tribune/Asahi Evening News had a brief blurb from the Reuters Wire (page 3, Feb 6) saying that FamilyMart is removing the books from its shelves.

Meanwhile, I stop by every convenience store I see. Haven’t seen the mag yet in the Kansai. Good. Debito in Hirakata

GAIJIN HANZAI Mag publisher “Joey Washington” a penname, not allowed

mytest

Hi Blog. According to a friend, whenever you publish something in Japan, you must put down the publisher’s name. On the GAIJIN HANZAI Mag, it is listed as “Joey H. Washington”, which is clearly a pseudonym, given the information below.

This is apparently not permitted under Japanese publishing laws. I’m in transit down south, and don’t have time to do research on this at the moment (so I’ll throw it out to the blogosphere for somebody else). Anyone want to do some research on the laws or the people involved here?

Information from a friend follows. Debito

============================
I’m given to understand that ISBN registration requires use of real
names, and “Joey H. Washington” does not appear on the Mook’s registration,
which is as follows.

http://www.isbn-center.jp/cgi-bin/isbndb/isbn.cgi

Notice publisher number at top is 7542.

ISBN of the mook is 9784754256180.

This parses as 978-4-7542-56180.

978 is general classification for book.

4 means Japan.

7542 is Eichi code.

56180 is the specific ISBN the published has assigned for the book for a list of purchased valid numbers.

Company website has more information on company.

http://www.eichi.co.jp/information/outline.html

代表取締役社長 is 上野文明.

Someone should telephone to 03-6419-2750 (or number given in magazine) and ask to speak to the person named in the mook as its publisher — or to Ueno if that doesn’t get the response you want.

ENDS

The Times (London) Weblog on GAIJIN HANZAI Mag Issue

mytest

Hi Blog. GAIJIN HANZAI Magazine issue now in another British publication: The Times London. Have a look. Thanks to Mr Parry. Debito

You’re not big, you’re not clever
By Richard Lloyd Parry, The Times Online Weblog
February 04, 2007
http://timesonline.typepad.com/times_tokyo_weblog/2007/02/ill_keep_this_b.html
(REPORTER BIO: Richard Lloyd Parry is the Asia Editor for The Times and has lived in Japan since 1995. He is also Foreign correspondent of the year.)

I’ll keep this brief because the tale is recounted in detail on other blogs – but there is an illuminating flap in progress over a magazine which appeared a few days ago in Japanese convenience stores. It is entitled Gaijin Hanzai Ura Fairu (‘Foreigners Underground Crime File’). I don’t yet have a copy myself, but a number of pages are scanned in at the pages indicated below. From these it is clear that it is a work of scrabrous racism of a kind which, in the west, you would not find outside the publications of the dedicated ultra-right. But this magazine was on sale in Family Mart, a chain convenience store with branches every few hundred years across Japan.

The magazine (or mook – Japanese for a hybrid of a magazine and a book) gives explicit expression to a notion which peeps between the lines of a lot of crime reporting – that crime in Japan is simply and straighforwardly the fault of foreigners. Not Caucasians or Europeans/North Americans (one and the same in this kind of thinking), but Africans, South Americans, South Asians and people of the Middle East.

There is an article about the state of Tokyo entitled:

City of violent, degenerate foreigners!

Another piece is headlined:

Catch the Iranian!

But the giveaway is a series of photographs, sneakily shot with a telephoto lens, of Japanese women canoodling with gaijin men (reminiscent of those old Ku Klux Klan publications showing pictures of mixed race couples guilty of “miscegenation”.)

Profanity and racist invective follow.

You sluts really think foreign guys are so great, huh!!

and

Oi Nigger!! Get your fuckin’ hands off that Japanese lady’s ass!!

and

This is Japan! Go back to your own fuckin’ country and do that!

And then the clincher:

We know Japanese guys are small, but . . .

Oh no. How sad. How disappointingly obvious. There was I, hoping to identify a complicated racial paradigm shift, or a radical rippling of the zeitgeist (or at the least a dangerous breach in the space-time continuum). But it turns out to be all about a little bloke somewhere who, in the words of Lily Allen, is “small in the game” . . .

A Google Blog Search for Gaijin Hanzai Ura File or Gaijin Hanzai Ura File or 外人犯罪裏ファイル will lead you to the latest webchat. The most comprehensive blogging on the subject so far is by that tireless campaigner for gaijin rights, Arudou Debito. He’s updating with new posts, so start from the top of the page, but the original post, including images from the mook, is here. The later posts contain the text of a letter to Family Mart (which ahs outlets in the US) demanding the removal of the offensive publication. Apparently they have agreed to do so within a week – which doesn’t strike me as particularly prompt or effective action.

If you want to buy it for yourself, it’s here on Japanese Amazon.

Posted by Richard Lloyd Parry on February 04, 2007 at 11:06 PM |
ENDS

「外人犯罪裏ファイル」雑誌コンビニ等で発売中

mytest

皆様こんばんは。有道 出人です。いつもお世話になっております。
gaijinhanzaifile2007.jpg

さて、近日から外国人住民コミュニティーで物議を醸し出したことですが、「外人[まま]犯罪裏ファイル」という雑誌はコンビニ(特にファミリマート)等とアマゾンで発売中です。内容はこれです:

=========================================
タイトル:
驚愕の外人犯罪裏ファイル2007

■発売日:2007/01/31
■定価:¥690-(税込)
■分類:エンターテイメント
■ページ(分):128p
■ISBN(雑誌コード):9784754256180

衝撃のフォトスクープ!新宿・渋谷・六本木。徹底検証、なぜ日本が狙われる?日本を震撼させた外国人犯罪10大事件!警察庁、元警視庁刑事インタビュー。外国人犯罪データベース2006等。ビジュアルと読み応え満足の1冊。
http://www.eichi.co.jp/esp.cgi?_file=detail1709&_page2=detail&_global_cg=magazine&_global_md=entertainer&_global_dt=others&sys_id=1709&
=========================================
詳しく内容;
https://www.debito.org/wp-content/uploads/2007/02/gaijinhanzaifile2007.jpg

表紙:
http://www.amazon.co.jp/gp/product/images/4754256182/ref=dp_image_0/503-2008728-9595969?ie=UTF8&n=465392&s=books
今!!外国のワルどもがニッポンを食い尽くすーー
2007年は誰もが外人犯罪の目的になる
日中韓のワルが手を組んだ!!
北朝鮮国家ぐるみ悪行三昧!!
凶悪中国人犯罪者の手口!!
外人どもに日本を蹂躙(じゅうりん)させていいのか!!

中身(それぞれの記事の見出し):
日本における外人犯罪件数年間47000件!!
各国の危険度:
China: 14 Russia: 5 Korea: 9 Brazil: 8 Colombia: 3
(日本人の犯罪は含まれていない)
「イラン人を捕まえ!!」
「不良外人暴力都市!!」
「毟られる日本人。『シャチョサン、ATMコッチデス』」
「YELLOW CAB REAL STREET PHOTO お前らそんなに外人がイイのかよ!!」
「そりゃあ日本人は小さいけど」
「おいニガー!!日本婦女子のケツさわってんじゃねえ!!」
「ここは日本なんだよ!てめえの国に帰ってやりな!」
「チョット、チョット、チョット!路上で手マンはやめてくれる?」

参考のページスキャン:
http://i44.photobucket.com/albums/f40/mrscuzzbucket/img037.jpg
http://i44.photobucket.com/albums/f40/mrscuzzbucket/img036.jpg
http://i44.photobucket.com/albums/f40/mrscuzzbucket/img033-1.jpg
http://i44.photobucket.com/albums/f40/mrscuzzbucket/img034.jpg
http://i44.photobucket.com/albums/f40/mrscuzzbucket/img032.jpg
http://i44.photobucket.com/albums/f40/mrscuzzbucket/img031.jpg
http://i44.photobucket.com/albums/f40/mrscuzzbucket/img030.jpg

出版社: 
=========================================
英知出版株式会社 (英文社名 Eichi Publishing co.,ltd.)
所在地 東京都渋谷区神宮前五丁目38番地4号
URL http://www.eichi.co.jp
代表者 代表取締役社長 上野 文明
従業員数
51名(正社員のみ)
参加団体 日本雑誌協会 雑誌公正取引協議会 出版文化産業振興財団
事業内容
書籍及び雑誌の出版・販売・編集受託業務
インターネットホームページの企画・制作
国内および国際付加価値通信網による情報提供サービス
映像ソフトの企画・製作・販売
http://www.eichi.co.jp/information/outline.html
=========================================

 そこで、英字のブログ世界では憤慨が多く、抗議文キャンペーンが打ち上げられ、それぞれの販売先(特にアマゾン・ジャパンの社長は香港生まれの中国系カナダ人のようなので、中国人の描写はどう思うでしょうか)にを送ったが、FAMIMA(アメリカのファミリーマート系列)のみからこの返事が来ました:

(前略)「7日間以内にこの雑誌を下げさせていただきます。」(後略)
担当者:
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
FAMIMA CORPORATION HIDENARI SATO
20000 Mariner Ave, Suite 100, Torrance, CA 90503
Tel:310-214-1001 Fax:310-214-7200

e-mail: hsato@famima-usa.com
URL: http://www.famima-usa.com
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
原文(英語)は
https://www.debito.org/?p=199

 しかし、その後、これに対して他者からのブログのコメント:

「どうせこの雑誌の賞味期限は1〜2週間にすぎないから、そんなに発売の予定は変更されていないんじゃない?なぜ『すみません、いますぐ撤去する』と言えない?誠意を感じない。」
https://www.debito.org/?p=199#comments

 更に波紋がすぐ広がりました。今朝、英国の英字新聞「The Guardian」は既に「日本のゼノフォービア(外人恐怖症)」について記事を載せました(英語):
http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,,2004645,00.html

 そして、Japan Probeというブログが「ファミリーマートに対して不買運動をしよう」と勧めてきました。
http://www.japanprobe.com/

 そのために、私は和英の抗議文を自分のブロクに載せました:
boycott-familymart.jpg
==========================================
Dear Family Mart Management:

I have always enjoyed being a customer of yours. However, I am gravely disappointed that you have decided to stock and sell a magazine entitled GAIJIN HANZAI URA FAIRU, which in my view offers discriminatory statements and images about non-Japanese residents of Japan.

Please remove this magazine from your shelves immediately and return them to the publisher. Please take care not to sell magazines of this type ever again in your stores.

Until you do, I will not shop in your store, and will tell my friends overseas and nationwide to boycott your stores. Non-Japanese are important customers too, and in this competitive market it will be no trouble for us to take our business elsewhere.

Sincerely,

冠省 いつもファミリーマートで日常品を購入させていただいております。

 しかし、最近貴社が雑誌「外人犯罪裏ファイル」を販売に対し、大変絶望しております。当雑誌のなか、「おいニガー!!日本婦女子のケツさわってんじゃねえ!!」「路上で手マンはやめてくれる?」「お前らそんなに外人がイイのかよ!!」「ここは日本なんだよ!てめえの国に帰ってやりな!」等という発言が載り、意図的に外国人住民のイメージ・ダウンを図っており、差別意識を助長しています。貴社が当雑誌を取り扱っていることに非常に憤りを感じております。

 よって、この雑誌をいますぐ棚から撤去し、販売を取り止め、出版社に返却して下さい。そして、二度とこのような雑誌を取り扱わないで下さい。

 このままですと、私は当分の間、他のコンビニで買い物をします。そして、私は友人にも連絡して、ファミリーマートの国内かつ海外店舗(米国でモFamima!モ社など)にも不買運動を促進します。宜しくお願いします。草々
==========================================

ダウンロードはできます。コンビニに持ち込んで抗議する人が多いようです。

https://www.debito.org/?p=205

 皆様、このような雑誌があってはいけないと思うなら、感想をそれぞれの販売先にお伝え下さい。

Family Mart Japan:
http://www.family.co.jp/
http://famima-usa.com/contactus/index.html

Seven and Y Holdings (7-Eleven):
http://www.7andy.jp/books/detail?accd=07179548

英知出版株式会社:
URL http://www.eichi.co.jp

Amazon.co.jp:
https://www.amazon.co.jp/gp/help/contact-us/english-speaking-customer.html/503-2008728-9595969?ie=UTF8&nodeId=

 宜しくお願い致します。有道 出人

“BOYCOTT FAMILY MART”; Letter in E and J for you to download

mytest

Here you go, Bloggers. Download this letter in English and Japanese and take it to your Family Mart. It’s self explanatory.

familymartboycottletter.pdf

(PDF Format)

familymartboycottletter.doc

(Word Format)

How it reads:

(I can’t get PDF, Word, or .htm saved from Word to display on this page, so let me put the text and graphics below for you to read. Download from links above for a printable formatted copy, one page. Debito)

==========================================

boycott-familymart.jpggaijinhanzaifile2007.jpg

Dear Family Mart Management:

I have always enjoyed being a customer of yours. However, I am gravely disappointed that you have decided to stock and sell a magazine entitled GAIJIN HANZAI URA FAIRU, which in my view offers discriminatory statements and images about non-Japanese residents of Japan.

Please remove this magazine from your shelves immediately and return them to the publisher. Please take care not to sell magazines of this type ever again in your stores.

Until you do, I will not shop in your store, and will tell my friends overseas and nationwide to boycott your stores. Non-Japanese are important customers too, and in this competitive market it will be no trouble for us to take our business elsewhere.

Sincerely,

冠省 いつもファミリーマートで日常品を購入させていただいております。

 しかし、近日貴社が雑誌「外人犯罪裏ファイル」を販売に対し、大変絶望しております。当雑誌のなか、「おいニガー!!日本婦女子のケツさわってんじゃねえ!!」「路上で手マンはやめてくれる?」「お前らそんなに外人がイイのかよ!!」「ここは日本なんだよ!てめえの国に帰ってやりな!」等という発言が載り、意図的に外国人住民のイメージ・ダウンを図っており、差別意識を助長しています。貴社が当雑誌を取り扱っていることに非常に憤りを感じております。

 よって、この雑誌をいますぐ棚から撤去し、販売を取り止め、出版社に返却して下さい。そして、二度とこのような雑誌を取り扱わないで下さい。

 このままですと、私は当分の間、他のコンビニで買い物をします。そして、私は友人にも連絡して、ファミリーマートの国内かつ海外店舗(米国で”Famima!”社など)にも不買運動を促進します。宜しくお願いします。草々

==========================================

LETTER ENDS

////////////////////////////////////////

UPDATE FEB 4:

Just got back from an excursion to two FAMILY MART stores in Sapporo (Kita 2 Nishi 14 and Minami 12 Nishi 10). They just opened in Hokkaido a few months ago, and are pretty concerned about their image as a newcomer in this competitive market.

They had the magazine in stock. They don’t now. They were very nice about it, and took it off the shelves immediately.

It’s pretty easy to do:

1) Check to see if the magazine is on the racks.

2) Ask for the manager (kakari in or tenchou)

3) Ask him or her to accompany you to the racks, and indicate that this is the book in question.

4) Give him or her the letter and let them read it. Meanwhile, thumb to a couple of pages (you’ll see that in the Japanese version I include quotes of the problematic language in red font–particularly the bit about the n****r clause and on-street fingering; this has nothing to do with foreign crime anyway). Should cause a shock, appropriately.

5) Ask them to take it off the rack and send it back (the letter does too).

6) BE POLITE ABOUT IT.

In both cases, the manager was very apologetic and cooperative, and away went the mags to the back room. Should think this will happen elsewhere too, as the company is neither charged for the delivery nor the return of any publications they don’t sell.

I’ll be heading south tomorrow. Think I’ll print up a number of these letters and stop by any FAMILY MART I see….

Guardian UK on GAIJIN HANZAI Mag

mytest

Hi Blog. Fruition. Debito

=====================================

Magazine plays to Japanese xenophobia

Available in mainstream bookstores, magazine targets Iranians, Chinese, Koreans and US servicemen

Justin McCurry in Tokyo

Friday February 2, 2007

Guardian Unlimited (UK) newspaper online

http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,,2004645,00.html

PHOTO:Human rights activists say the magazine is indicative of the climate of fear of foreigners created by conservative newspapers and politicians

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 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.”

ENDS

Blogosphere: Boycott Family Mart (for selling GAIJIN HANZAI mag)

mytest

excerpted from Japan Probe blog–Debito
Courtesy http://www.japanprobe.com/?p=1072
boycott.gif

The magazine [GAIJIN HANZAI URA FILES] is disgusting, and I don’t think it would be out of line to use the word racist when referring to it. We here at Japan Probe are not going to let a mainstream convenience store like Family Mart get away with selling such offensive material. We would like to call for an international boycott of FamilyMart-affiliated convenience stores.

What exactly do we mean by “international boycott of FamilyMart-affiliated convenience stores”?

FamilyMart has 12,000 stores worldwide, in countries including South Korea, China, Canada, and the United States. We ask that you not shop at any of these stores.

Please write letters or e-mails to FamilyMart corporation, letting them know your displeasure with their decision to sell racist literature. [See the list below]

Spread the word about this to everyone you know. The foreign community in Japan is very small, so we will need every person we can get. If you have friends in one of the other countries FamilyMart operates, let them know about the boycott. If you have a website or blog, please write about this and spread the news [feel free to use the above image to show your support to the boycott]. If anyone has contacts in the media, please let them know about this!

We also support any other peaceful and legal method of getting the word out about this issue.
What do we want from Family Mart?

FamilyMart must issue an official apology and remove all copies of the magazine from its stores.

FamilyMart must stop selling publications from the company responsibile for the magazine in question. [Unless the publisher issues an apology and halts sales of the book.]

FamilyMart must make assurances that it will not sell similar racist literature in the future.

Charitible donations by FamilyMart Co. to organizations that promote international understanding would also be desirable.
If you’re planning to contact FamilyMart and complain, please use the following contact information:

FamilyMart Japan
FamilyMart Co., Ltd.
Head office
26-10,Higashi-Ikebukuro 4-chome,
Toshima-ku,Tokyo 170-8404,Japan
Telephone:(81)3-3989-6600

Family Mart USA
Tel: 310-214-1001
Fax: 310-214-7200
Email: info@famima-usa.com

As part of this campaign, we would like to compile a list of known store locations that have sold the magazine in question. If possible, take pictures of the magazines on their display rack, so we can post them here. If you buy a copy as a reference, scan your receipt as proof that it was purchased at FamilyMart. [It’s also rumored that Daily Yamazaki convenience stores are also selling the magazine, and if we get enough reports regarding Daily Yamazaki, we will add them to the boycott.]

List of online retailers currently selling Gaijin Hanzai Ura File

Amazon.co.jp
7&Y [Part of the Seven Eleven Group]
E-hon
Kinokuniya BookWeb
JBook
Boople
Rakuten Books
Honya Town

boycott.gif
more at http://www.japanprobe.com/?p=1072

“GAIJIN HANZAI FILE” pubs spectre of evil foreign crime

mytest

Hello Blog. Here’s a lovely little 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 do, including seducing our women on the street…

Here’s a scan of the cover, with all manner of caricature which would be deemed offensive in any other developed country. And to give you an example of the hate speech within, some excerpts (Steve’s translation), and links to scanned images follow. Please excuse the language.

gaijinhanzaifile2007.jpg

Turning the keyboard over to Steve, as he has portrayed the goods most effectively. I’ve made sure the UN has gotten word. Debito in Sapporo

===================================================

OK,OK, I caved in and my curiosity got the better of me. I’ve scanned some pages at the bottom of this email:

Publisher: Eichi Shuppan 150-001 Tokyo-to, Shibuya-ku, Jingumae 5-38-4
Publisher-in-Chief: Joey H. Washington (I wonder who this guy is?)

Available online at
http://www.eichi.co.jp/esp.cgi?_file=detail1709&_page2=detail&_global_cg=magazine&_global_md=entertainer&_global_dt=others&sys_id=1709&

Here are some ‘highlights’:

Back Page:
日本における外人犯罪件数年間47000件!!
47,000 crimes by foreigners each year!!
There then follows a ‘danger rating’ (危険度) 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…

Article about crimes by Iranians:
イラン人を捕まえ!!
Catch the Iranian!!

Article lamenting Tokyo’s demise into lawlessness:
不良外人暴力都市!!
City of Violent Degenerate Foreigners!!

Article about foreigners scamming Japanese for money:
毟られる日本人。『シャチョサン、ATMコッチデス』
Japanese getting conned. “Theesaway to ze ATM, Meester Managing Director”

Feature of foreign guys picking up Japanese women (What this has to do with ‘crime’ is unclear)
YELLOW CAB REAL STREET PHOTO
お前らそんなに外人がイイのかよ!!
You sluts really think foreign guys are so great, huh!!
そりゃあ日本人は小さいけど。。
We know Japanese guys are small, but..

Picture of black guy touching a J.girls ass in Shibuya (obviously consensual too)
おいニガー!!日本婦女子のケツさわってんじゃねえ!!
Oi Nigger!! Get your fuckin’ hands off that Japanese lady’s ass!!
(… yes. It really does say ニガー)

Picture of dark-haired foreigner kissing J.girl in Shibuya (again, obviously consensual)
ここは日本なんだよ!てめえの国に帰ってやりな!
This is Japan! Go back to your own fuckin’ country and do that!

Picture of foreigner with hands down a J.girls knickers in Shibuya (definitely consensual)
チョット、チョットチョット!路上で手マンはやめてくれる?
Woah! Woah! Woah! Would you stop fingering a girls pussy in the street, OK?

Links to scanned images:

http://i44.photobucket.com/albums/f40/mrscuzzbucket/img037.jpg

http://i44.photobucket.com/albums/f40/mrscuzzbucket/img036.jpg

http://i44.photobucket.com/albums/f40/mrscuzzbucket/img033-1.jpg

http://i44.photobucket.com/albums/f40/mrscuzzbucket/img034.jpg

http://i44.photobucket.com/albums/f40/mrscuzzbucket/img032.jpg

http://i44.photobucket.com/albums/f40/mrscuzzbucket/img031.jpg

http://i44.photobucket.com/albums/f40/mrscuzzbucket/img030.jpg
===================================================

ENDS

Yomiuri Jan 24 07 on foreigners “filling” J prisons

mytest

Hi Blog. Interesting article on the foreign population in prison. Pretty light fare (a heckuva lot of details about food, naturally), but some decent stats. Comment from friend Steve (who forwarded me the article) follows. Debito in Sapporo

//////////////////////////////////////////////
Foreigners filling nation’s jails / Prisons bulging, struggling to cope with nonnatives’ needs
The Yomiuri Shimbun January 24, 2007

http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/dy/national/20070124TDY03004.htm

(PHOTO: Instructions for taking a bath are written in 13 languages, including Japanese, Chinese and Spanish, at a changing room in Fuchu Prison in Tokyo.)

The number of prison inmates across the country is rising, and there is no sign the trend will reverse.

As of the end of November, the nation’s jails held about 71,500 inmates. To run efficiently, prisons should operate at no more than 80 percent of capacity, but the current level is 117 percent.

Fuchu Prison, the nation’s largest, is a 260,000 square meter facility that includes a three-story residential building used only to house foreign inmates.

In the evening, inmates finish working at the prison’s factories and return to the building. Each cell has a sign on its door indicating the type and size of meal the inmate should be served. A “special meal” sign indicates that an inmate requires special consideration concerning meals because, for example, he is a vegetarian. A sign reading ‘190,’ for example, indicates the height of a tall inmate, to ensure extra food is served to him.

At 5 o’clock, dinner is served at each cell. Bread instead of rice is served to most of the foreign inmates. A typical day might see the inmates served grilled salmon in sweet sake with boiled bamboo shoots. Deep-fried vegetables would be served instead of salmon for vegetarians. Beef or chicken dishes are served to Muslims when pork is served to other inmates.

About 3,200 inmates, 360 more than the capacity, are held at Fuchu Prison. Among them, about 550 are foreigners. The number is 1.3 times more than were incarcerated 10 years ago.

Most of them do not understand Japanese. Research officer of the prison Kenji Sawada said, “It’s difficult to understand their languages and cultural differences such as those pertaining to food.”

Religious beliefs are taken into account. Three meals are served at one time in the evening for Muslims during the fasting month of Ramadan when they do not eat during daylight hours.

Masatsugu Yazawa, who specializes in the needs of foreign inmates said, “There are inmates who talk about religious holidays I’ve never heard of. It’s difficult to check whether the events really exist.”

An inmate who had been held as a prisoner of war during Iran-Iraq War grew frenzied in his cell as he recalled his wartime experience. Yazawa said there are quite a few inmates who become unstable as they cannot understand Japanese and have other stresses besides their sentences.

In a building in the center of the facility, signs detailing the nationalities of each foreign inmate line a white board in a room for officials who tend to the needs of foreign inmates.

The board showed that the prison houses inmates from 46 countries who speak 35 languages. The figure has increased from 22 countries in 1986, and 39 in 1996.

The number of inmates from Southeast Asia, Eastern Europe, Africa and Central America has increased in the past 20 years.

Some inmates speak languages unfamiliar to their warders, such as Wolof of Senegal and Luganda of Uganda. Prison officials managed to find interpreters for such inmates through embassies, universities and other organizations.

“We couldn’t find an interpreter for a Chinese inmate who spoke the Wenzhou language of southern China. We eventually had to communicate through writing,” Masayuki Fukuyoshi from the international affairs section said.

Seventy-six volunteers are registered with the prison as translators of about 40 languages to check letters addressed to the inmates.About 10 of the volunteers work alongside officials who know a foreign language to translate about 300 letters every day.

As of Nov. 30, 2006, the number of foreign inmates nationwide was 5,312–2.6 times more than a decade ago. Most of them face deportation when they are released.

Although 61 countries have signed an agreement to mutually deport inmates, including Japan, South Korea, some European nations and the United States, no such agreement exists with Brazil, China, and Iran, from where many foreign inmates come.

“Since we can only deport inmates when they agree to deportation, the effect of signing the agreement is uncertain,” a Justice Ministry senior official said. (Daily Yomiuri, Jan. 24, 2007)

//////////////////////////////////////////////
ENDS

COMMENT FROM FRIEND STEVE

Today, Wed. Jan. 24th, a highly misleading article appeared in the Daily Yomiuri catchily headlined “Foreigners filling nation’s jails” (page 3).

It noted that as of the end of November there are about 71,500 inmates in Japan, 117 percent of capacity, whereas the prisons are supposed to operate at 81% capacity. Not until the end of the article does it say that the number of foreign inmates was 5,312 as of Nov.30, 2006–2.6 times more than a decade ago. No statistics are given of what the whole prison population was a decade ago and I couldn’t find out through an internet search, though some of you may have the statistics.

Of course, impoverished, linguistically “handicapped,” and disenfranchised people in any country are generally more likely to commit crimes that would get them imprisoned than people who are better off, but it is fun and more interesting to speak in ethnic terms. Unfortunately, it seems like so many people here (and perhaps everywhere) stop at the headlines. But worse, even the mainstream papers don’t hesitate to post highly misleading ones.

5,312 sounds like a pittance to me–a mere 7.43 percent. Which of the suplus numbers of inmates can be said to be doing the filling? One could quite arbitrarily site any segment of the prison population if one wanted to mislead. The short ones? The tall ones? The old ones?

A much more significant article appeared in the Washington Post. Check out the following link:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/16/AR2006041600852.html

Below is a quote from it:

“Japanese over 60 now represent the country’s fastest-growing group of lawbreakers, with the soaring rate of senior delinquents far exceeding their growth in the general population. The number of those age 70 and older who have been charged has increased the most — doubling in just four years to a record 21,324 in 2004, the most recent year for which statistics are available. By comparison, juvenile arrests edged up only 2.2 percent during the same period, according to the National Police Agency.”

It doesn’t say how many of them have been imprisoned, only arrested (almost the same thing in Japan or is detention not counted as imprisonment?), but that is interesting, nonetheless. The DY for some reason doesn’t go after the elderly. Foreigners are an easy target. The two categories may inspire quite different emotional responses in the readers. ELDERLY??! Kawaisou. FOREIGNERS??! Naruhodo…

Letters to the editor of DY would be warranted, if anyone feels inspired.
Feel free to repeat or improve on anything in this message.

Steve in Tokyo
ENDS

AP primer on Japanese Immigration issues

mytest

Hi Blog. Pretty good article rounding up what we’ve been saying so far about the issues of Japanese immigration, particularly that of guest workers-cum-immigrants from South America reaching double-digit percentages of the population of some Japanese towns. Courtesy of Steve at The Community.

The article says few things which readers of this and other mailing lists don’t already know. But I’m glad to see this issue receiving wider attention overseas. Quite often it takes “gaiatsu” (overseas pressure) from exposure before the GOJ is ever shamed into doing something about its own social problems. For what do the policymaking elites care about these people? They care more about how it tarnishes Japan’s reputation overseas. Debito in Sapporo

////////////////////////////////////////

Japan Mulls Importing Foreign Workers

Associated press, courtesy of Salon.com

By JOSEPH COLEMAN Associated Press Writer

http://www.salon.com/wire/ap/archive.html?wire=D8MP5VG00.html

January 20,2007 | OIZUMI, Japan — At the Brazil Plaza shopping center, Carlos Watanabe thinks back on 12 lonely years as a factory worker in Japan — and can’t find a single thing to praise except the cold mug of Kirin lager in his hand.

He and his bar mates, all Japanese-Brazilian, have plenty of work and steady incomes, but they also have many complaints about their adopted home: that they’re isolated, looked down upon, cold-shouldered by City Hall.

“I want to go back to Brazil every day, but I don’t go because I don’t have the money,” says Watanabe, 28. “Sometimes I think I should go home, sometimes stay here, sometimes just go to another country.”

The administrators of Oizumi, 50 miles north of Tokyo, are also dissatisfied: The outsiders don’t speak enough Japanese. They don’t recycle their trash properly. Their kids don’t get along with their Japanese classmates.

“We want people to study Japanese and learn our rules before coming here,” Oizumi Mayor Hiroshi Hasegawa, whose business card is in Portuguese. “Until the national government decides on an immigration system, it’s going to be really tough.”

As a town of 42,000 with a 15 percent foreign population, the highest in Japan, Oizumi’s troubles are getting nationwide attention as the country wakes up to a demographic time bomb: In 2005, it became the world’s first leading economy to suffer a decline in population, with 21,408 more deaths than births — the feared onset of what may become a crippling labor shortage at mid-century.

The prospect of a shrinking, rapidly aging population is spurring a debate about whether Japan — so insular that it once barred foreigners from its shores for two centuries — should open up to more foreign workers.

Japan’s 2 million registered foreigners, 1.57 percent of the population, are at a record high but minuscule compared with the United States’ 12 percent.

For the government to increase those numbers would be groundbreaking in a nation conditioned to see itself as racially homogeneous and culturally unique, and to equate “foreign” with crime and social disorder.

“I think we are entering an age of revolutionary change,” said Hidenori Sakanaka, director of the Japan Immigration Policy Institute and a vocal proponent of accepting more outsiders. “Our views on how the nation should be and our views on foreigners need to change in order to maintain our society.”

Oizumi’s more than 6,500 foreigners, mostly Brazilian, provide a glimpse into what that change might look like.

Walk down the main drag and it’s obvious this is no typical Japanese town. Among the convenience stores and coffee shops are tattoo parlors and evangelical Christian churches. At the Canta Galo grocery, people line up at an international phone to call family 10,000 miles away.

The only reason these foreigners are able to be here is their Japanese descent, which entitles them by law to come here as guest workers.

Watanabe’s grandparents emigrated to Brazil decades ago, and he and his friends stand out in Japan with their non-Japanese features, booming voices and backslapping manners. At 2 a.m., after a night out with friends, his manner becomes even less Japanese — shirt off to expose a hefty belly, howling farewells as he drives off in a beat-up car.

Not everyone feels as isolated as he does. Another Brazilian, Claudinei Naruishi, has a Japanese wife and two kids, and wants to buy a house. “I like it here,” he says.

Still, City Hall officials are clearly overwhelmed trying to plug the holes in a social system that seems to assume that everyone living in Japan is Japanese.

“We’re kind of an experimental region,” said Hiroe Kato, of the town’s international section. “Japanese people want immigrants to come here and live just like us. But foreigners are different.”

Speaking poor Japanese, they tend to be cut off from their neighbors, unable to — or critics say, unwilling to — communicate with policemen, file tax returns or understand notices to separate plastic garbage from burnables.

Schooling is compulsory in Japan until age 16, but only for citizens. So foreign kids can skip school with impunity. Arrangements such as special Japanese classes for newcomers are ad hoc and understaffed. Many of the foreigners aren’t entitled to pensions or the same health benefits as Japanese workers because they’re hired through special job brokers.

Above all, the differences are cultural and rife with stereotypes: Latinos playing music late on weekends; teenagers congregating in the streets at night, alarming police.

“We have people who don’t follow the rules,” said Mayor Hasegawa. “So then we have a lot of cultural friction.”

All the same, demographics suggest Japan has little choice but to open the doors a little further.

The population is 127 million and is forecast to plunge to about 100 million by 2050, when more than a third of Japanese will be 65 or older and drawing health and pension benefits. Less than half of Japanese, meanwhile, will be of working age of 15-64.

Fearing disastrous drops in consumption, production and tax revenues, Japan’s bureaucrats are scrambling to boost the birthrate and get more women and elderly into the work force. But many Japanese are realizing that foreigners must be part of the equation.

Few support throwing the doors wide open. Instead, they want educated workers, engineers, educators and health professionals, preferably arriving with Japanese-language skills.

Corporate leaders are prime movers. “We can create high-value and unique services and products by combining the diversity of foreigners and the teamwork of the Japanese,” said Hiroshi Tachibana, senior managing director of Japan’s top business federation, Keidanren.

But government officials are so touchy about the subject that they deny the country has an immigration policy at all, and insist on speaking of “foreign workers” rather than “immigrants” who might one day demand citizenship.

Immigration in Japan does not have a happy history. The first wave in modern times came a century or more ago from conquered lands in Korea and China, sometimes in chains as slaves. Those still here — the largest group being Koreans and their descendants — still suffer discrimination and isolation.

Even today, the policy seems to lack coherent patterns. In 2005, for instance, about 5,000 engineers entered Japan, along with 100,000 “entertainers” — even after that vaguely defined status was tightened because it was being used as a cover for the sex trade and human trafficking.

Since taking office in September, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has spoken vaguely of opening Japan to the world, but authorities acknowledge they are nowhere near a consensus on how to proceed.

They don’t want to emulate the U.S. and admit sustained and large-scale immigration, and are wary of France’s recent riots and Germany’s problems with guest workers who were welcomed when jobs were plentiful and now suffer from unemployment.

“Everybody, I think, is agreed on one thing: We want to attract the `good’ foreigners, and keep out the `bad’ ones,” said Hisashi Toshioka, of the Justice Ministry’s Immigration Bureau.

Today, Japan’s 302,000 Brazilians are its third-largest foreign minority after Koreans and Chinese. Watanabe and the other foreigners of Oizumi are the human legacy of that policy.

Instead of a chain of schools to absorb the newcomers into Japan, the reverse seems to be happening.

In 1999 the Brazilian education company Pitagoras opened a school in Ota, a town neighboring Oizumi, to improve the foreign children’s Portuguese and prepare them for a possible return to Brazil. Japan now has six Pitagoras outlets.

Maria Lucia Graciano Franca, a teacher at the Ota school, said many of the workers’ children speak neither Portuguese nor Japanese well and have trouble fully adjusting to life in Brazil or Japan.

“They go back to Brazil, they stay for a while, and they come back here,” she said as children practiced dance moves for a school concert. “And the ones who stay in Japan follow the same route as their parents — they work in the factories.”

The grown-ups are torn too.

At the bar at Brazil Plaza on a Saturday afternoon, Watanabe and friends were in a heated debate about whether they could live on Brazil’s minimum wage.

Opinion was divided between those like Naruishi who feel they’re making it in Japan, and those like Watanabe who long for their homeland.

Naruishi started out in Japan 13 years ago making tofu and now works in car sales. “Live in Brazil? No,” he said. “The salaries there are too low.”

But all agreed on one point: Japan is a tough society to break into.

“The Japanese don’t like foreigners,” said Cleber Parra, 30, who concedes he shares the blame because he doesn’t speak much Japanese. “We’re noisy and lazy — they don’t like that.”

The group moved onto another bar in the afternoon and evening, then gathered at around 11 p.m. at a club where a live band played “forra,” a type of Brazilian country music.

After hours of shimmying on the packed dance floor, they spilled into the dark, quiet streets of Oizumi, laughing and chatting. A police car on the watch silently circled the block, red lights flashing.

ARTICLE ENDS

Salon provides breaking news articles from the Associated Press as a service to its readers, but does not edit the AP articles it publishes.

UPDATE: Visiting Immigration re Spouse Visa questionnaire

mytest

Hi Blog:

UPDATE TO SPOUSE VISA QUESTIONNAIRE ISSUE
IMMIGRATION’S STANDPOINT

By Arudou Debito, January 20, 2007

Background to the issue at
https://www.debito.org/?p=158

I visited Sapporo’s very friendly Immigration Bureau (Nyuukoku Kanrikyoku) yesterday to find out more about the Questionnaire (shitumonsho) for people marrying Japanese and applying for the appropriate visa. I talked with an avuncular Mr Yamamoto, Chief of the Inspection Division (shinsa bumon), and one of his associates for about an hour regarding the requirements for certain types of visas based upon conjugal status.

When I showed him the requirements, as outlined on the Ministry of Justice homepage (http://www.moj.go.jp/ONLINE/IMMIGRATION/16-1.html), he professed to never having seen them before, and found it an interesting read (he in fact asked to copy my printout, since the computers in his office are not connected to the Internet!–for fear of, he said, viruses). Likewise with the Shitumonsho (http://www.moj.go.jp/ONLINE/IMMIGRATION/16-1-25.pdf), which he said was not to his knowledge required in all Immigration offices. His associate later corrected him to say that it was now required nationwide, but nobody was sure from when. They are finding out for me.

============================

Anyhoo, first some facts about the applicability of the form, which, as we noted before and will discuss below, is quite intrusive. It does not apply to every Spouse Visa (haiguusha biza). It only applies to those wishing to come to Japan as a married J-F couple FROM OVERSEAS. It also applies, they admitted, to some cases where people who get married in Japan, or have been married in Japan for some time but wish to switch their visas to a status involving marriage. Which means they will also have to fill out this questionnaire on a case-by-case basis. It is of course meant to sniff out fake marriages (i.e. people who have arranged or brokered marriages with Japanese merely in order to live in Japan). So in the eyes of Immigration, it is just a procedural matter, not meant to be intrusive.

We went through each section of the Shitsumonsho, where I asked them why this particular question was raised, and what they would do with the information. I also raised some reactions from the non-Japanese community, to hear how Immigration would respond:

============================

SECTION ONE: THE COUPLE’S NAMES, ADDRESSES, NATIONALITIES, AND CONTACT DETAILS

This section we skipped because this needs no justification. Except the bit about telling Immigration about the size of your apartment and the amount of rent you pay.

JUSTIFICATION: “We need this to square away your lifestyle details. If we find that they’re living in an apartment that seems beyond their means, or is too cheap to be realistic based upon the size, or too small for the indicated number of occupants, we can get an idea if this marriage is genuine or not.”

When I asked them whether or not Japanese would be bothered by this question, or whether the size of your apartment really was essential information, they said probably and probably not. So we moved on.

============================

SECTION TWO: THE COUPLE’S LOVE LIFE–THE STORY OF HOW THEY CAME TOGETHER AND GOT MARRIED

JUSTIFICATION: “We need this story because it’s the best way to judge the marriage’s authenticity (shin pyou sei). We can generally tell from this whether or not this is the real thing. Too many stories match each other, we know which are artificial or group-generated. Same with photos–sometimes these marriages of convenience have the same background in them. The more details and individuality, the better. It’s not unlike those checks you see for Green Cards overseas.”

REACTIONS: I then raised some questions about how Japanese would feel if asked to justify their love life to bureaucrats. After all, said some people sardonically, are bureaucrats so bored or voyeuristic that they need a love story put down on paper for them, to brighten their day or justify their kleenex use either above or below? What if the couple objected to this intrusion and said this was a private matter? And if this really is a story that needs credibility checking, what of the lack of cross-checking when one story passes for the two of them?

THEIR REACTIONS: “You can skip filling out this section if you like. There’s nothing in this document which says you must fill out EVERY section. We have to have this document ready for all occasions, so just don’t fill out the sections you feel don’t apply to you. Those who do everything in great detail will be more quickly judged, is all. Those who don’t will need more deliberation and questioning later. We’re trying to consolidate this all into one step.

“Look, we have to judge this marriage somehow, as you know–we can’t just let in everyone who says they’re married, when we know plenty of them aren’t really. But those who really object to this section are probably genuine marriages anyway.”

They had no real answer regarding the lack of cross-checking. And they admitted that Japanese would probably find having to justify their love to the State offensive. “It’s just a different situation when you’re dealing with Immigration issues.”

============================

SECTION TWO POINT TWO: WHO INTRODUCED YOU? NAMES, ADDRESSES, AND RELATIONSHIPS PLEASE

JUSTIFICATION: “There’s plenty of brokers, fake and real, who arrange marriages both for love or convenience. If you don’t have any particular marriage broker (say, you met at a party), then don’t fill out this section; it doesn’t apply to you. But if there is a broker involved, we want to know who and where he is. There are criminal brokers out there we need to keep track of.”

============================

SECTION THREE: YOUR LANGUAGE AND MUTUAL COMMUNICATION ABILITY

JUSTIFICATION: “We need to know if they can communicate with each other because real married couples have to communicate somehow, right? If they can’t, or if it turns out their professed communication abilities are not what we discover later in conversation, red flags.”

REACTIONS: I pointed out how questions like this would sit with some non-Japanese residents: In Japan, there is a preternatural curiosity with communications and conflicts in international relationships, even at an official level (see passim https://www.debito.org/enoughisenough.html#footnote7) What language do they speak together, what do they fight about, how do they resolve conflicts? There is a near-lecherous fascination with how Johnny Foreigner and Junko Japanese duke it out, and it’s none of anyone’s business.

There is also a question in this section about how the foreigner got so good in Japanese. Is a high degree of language ability a reason for suspicion?

Moreover, there are plenty of Japanese couples who cannot communicate properly even though they share the same language. Are their marriages suspect too?

THEIR REACTIONS: “Questionnaires like these overseas also ask about language ability, and we think it’s only natural that we do some sort of survey.” I did get a laugh about the noncommunicating Japanese couples as well, which helped our meeting coast to the end. (Rule of thumb: Make a bureaucrat laugh, magic happens.)

============================

SECTIONS FOUR AND FIVE: WHO WITNESSED YOUR MARRIAGE, WHO CAME TO YOUR WEDDING?

JUSTIFICATION: “If it’s a real wedding, then there will be a real ceremony with the family involved, right? Shouldn’t be any stretch to give details if the wedding is genuine, right?”

REACTIONS: Not in my case. And not in many other cases, I’m sure. Neither my or her family attended our my first marriage, so there. Come to think of it, my naturalization procedure was less intrusive than this.
(https://www.debito.org/residentspage.html#naturalization)

THEIR REACTIONS: “Well, okay.”

============================

SECTION SIX: YOUR MARRIAGE RECORD–YOU BEEN MARRIED BEFORE?

JUSTIFICATION: “We ask this because there are ‘marriage launderers’ out there, who go overseas, get married, bring back a foreign spouse, then divorce. Repeat process. It’s lucrative. And no, the repeat marriages won’t necessarily show up on the Japanese’s koseki if they move their koseki around.”

REACTIONS: Well, okay.

============================

SECTIONS SEVEN AND EIGHT: HOW MANY TIMES HAVE YOU BOTH CROSSED THE BORDER TO EACH OTHER’S COUNTRIES?

JUSTIFICATION: “Helps us see if they’ve got an extended relationship. If you met and have been here in Japan the whole time, this is irrelevant, so skip.”

REACTIONS: Does this data really mean anything?

THEIR REACTIONS: “Not really. We generally just give it a glance.”

============================

SECTIONS NINE AND TEN: HAVE YOU EVER BEEN DEPORTED, AND WHY?

We skipped over this bit, because I can certainly see why this information is necessary.

============================

SECTION ELEVEN: YOUR FAMILY TREE

JUSTIFICATION: “We need to know who’s with you and who’s connected to you. And who to contact to check on certain details.”

REACTIONS: You need names, addresses, and phone numbers of people overseas too? You going to contact them too?

THEIR REACTIONS: “Probably not.”

============================

SECTION TWELVE: DO YOUR RELATIVES KNOW ABOUT YOUR MARRIAGE?

JUSTIFICATION: “It’s only natural that they would know about your marriage if it’s for real, right?”

REACTIONS: Not in my case. Or in other eloping cases. Is this really necessary?

THEIR REACTIONS: “Well, even if you elope, they eventually know, right? Helps us if and when we call the relatives.”

============================

CONCLUDING JUSTIFICATIONS: “This document is basically to make things easier for us and faster for you. If we have all the information in one place, such as in this document, then we can approve your application easier. If we don’t then we’re going to have to ask more questions. We need a procedure for checking on couples in this age of fake marriages of convenience–surely you understand that?”

REACTION: I do. But the image I get from the tone of this form is of an old patriarch of a family, trying to put the suitor through hell to get them to justify their love, and show how committed they really are to marrying their child. To some people, a few of these questions feel like ijime bullying.

THEIR REACTION: (laughter). “That’s a bit of a stretch, and not our intention. Again, just fill in the bits you want and skip the ones that are inapplicable or you consider too invasive.”

REACTION: Yeah, but given the threatening tone of the warning at the top and bottom (“Yeah, that is a bit shitsukoi, isn’t it.”), skipping bits does not feel like an option. And the discretion your agency enjoys, what’s to stop an arbitrary denial of your visa with no reason given just because we protest the intrusiveness?

THEIR REACTION: “People do file complaints and lawsuits against us for arbitrary refusals. It’s not as though there isn’t a check and balance.”

REACTION: The MOJ application site says here that there is no avenue for complaint or appeal.

THEIR REACTION: “Huh? That’s odd. Here, here’s the document containing the language you can file to appeal– “zairyuu shikaku ninteisho fukoufu ni taishite wa torikeshi soshou”). Immigration is obligated to tell you about this option. Dunno why it says you cannot appeal when people do.

(Scanned image of that form here. Click on thumbnail for larger image)
Japanese
appealimmigsoshou001.jpg
English
appealimmigsoshou002.jpg

“Anyway, we are in charge of our borders. That’s our job. Whenever there’s foreign crime or something faked to get a foreigner in Japan here illegally, people point fingers at us for letting them in in the first place. We do have discretionary power here, but that’s necessary. It’s an inevitable tool for us to do our job, and it’s something used by INS bureaus everywhere in the world.”

============================

There you go. Fascinating discussion. Hope this gives applicants some idea how to deal with this questionnaire.

Arudou Debito
Sapporo
debiito@debito.org
https://www.debito.org
January 20, 2007
ENDS

MDN Waiwai on dealing with police checkpoints: have boobs.

mytest

Hi Blog. A little humorous diversion. Mainichi’s Waiwai Page (a guilty pleasure–it really captures one facet of Japan’s fascinating media) has a story on how one person dealt with one of those nasty random NPA Gaijin Card Checkpoints:

========================

Busty babe puts pushy policemen in their place
Mainichi Daily News Waiwai Page January 11, 2007
http://mdn.mainichi-msn.co.jp/waiwai/news/20070111p2g00m0dm022000c.html
(excerpt)

A chance encounter on a Tokyo street gave a spunky half-American model a chance to make sure the capital’s uncouth law enforcers copped a blast, according to Shukan Asahi (1/19).

DJ-cum-model Yurika Amari ended up giving some of the Metropolitan Police Department’s plods a lesson in good manners.

She was making up for some rough handling she received from the long arm of the law after they suspected she was up to no good apparently because her big bust and lanky looks made her stand out from the crowded streets of Tokyo’s Shibuya district.

Amari, whose father is an American, was walking along the streets in late December when a couple of uniformed cops came up and grabbed her from behind. They whirled her around and demanded she tell them whether she was a foreigner and if she could speak Japanese.

One of the cops reached for Amari’s handbag. When she refused to give it to him, he snatched it away from her and began rifling through it. When the fuzz failed to find anything untoward, they began walking away, but Amari wasn’t letting them off so easily after what they’d just put her through. She asked their names and they simply flashed their police notebooks (the Japanese equivalent of a Western cop showing their badge) and sauntered off…

Amari filed a complaint with the MPD over the way the cops had handled her. She demanded a meeting with the officers who had accosted her and an apology. She ended up speaking to their boss, who refused to apologize for their behavior. With police refusing to express any regret, Amari asked for — and was given — the opportunity to educate the police on boorish behavior.

Tokyo’s cops acknowledged Amari taught them some lessons.

“Among the opinions she expressed were some that could be useful when it comes to questioning people in the future. She also works as a teacher at schools and places. We thought she may be able to provide us with some interesting views, so asked her to give a speech for us,” an MPD spokesman tells the Weekly.

Amari spoke for about 1 hour to around 80 police officers, most of them men in their 40s and 50s. She was pleased with the results.

“I used the experiences I’d been through to tell people about the best way to deal with women and advised them not to come up from behind people and grab them by the shoulders,” Amari tells Shukan Asahi. “I said everything I wanted to. There’s no bitterness left now.” (By Ryann Connell)
==================

ARTICLE ENDS

(Now, if only more of us could be eye candy for slavering cops, we might get more of an audience…!)