Mainichi & Asahi: 40% of Japan’s local govts received complaints about their policies designed to help NJ Residents. This fits a history of coordinated efforts from Far-Right internet trolls nationwide to stymie conscientious public policy. Hence being the “Good Gaijin” will not help you assimilate in this political climate.

Posted on December 22, 2025December 23, 2025 by Debito Arudou, Ph.D.

mytest

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(Original title of this blog post was, “Mainichi and Asahi: 40% of Japan’s local govts received coordinated complaints from Far-Right Internet Trolls nationwide, stymieing local-govt policies to help their NJ Residents. Hence being the “Good Gaijin” will not help you assimilate in this political climate.” But that was a bit misleading, so amended; H/T to SB.)

Hi Blog. I post these two articles because they offer evidence that becoming a part of Japanese society isn’t just a matter of being “Good Gaijin”, e.g., contributing and behaving until “your outward appearance causes no particular problems“. These are good things to do, of course, but they are not a panacea, because the Netto Uyoku (Far-Right Internet Xenophobes and Trolls) in Japan are well-organized and will not accept NJ as Residents under any circumstances.

There is in fact a long history of the Netto Uyoku and helpful local government policies shot down one after another due to a storm of “complaints” like these (many of which aren’t even from local residents; see the Asahi article below the Mainichi in Japanese), as seen in this case study from 2013 about Tottori Prefecture passed, then UN-PASSED, a human rights ordinance. This is how the structural barriers to NJ Residents remain, and will not be removed until governments stand up to racists and trolls like these. Debito Arudou, Ph.D.

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40% of Japan local gov’ts received complaints over foreigner policies: Mainichi survey

December 19, 2025 (Mainichi Japan), courtesy of Mark Schreiber

Courtesy https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20251219/p2a/00m/0na/010000c

Japanese version below

Photo: People raise signs opposing immigrants during a rally in Tokyo’s Shinjuku Ward on Nov. 30, 2025. (Mainichi)

FUKUOKA — There has been a spate of cases where local governments in Japan have been flooded with complaints over measures related to foreigners.

A Mainichi Shimbun survey covering 67 local bodies — 47 prefectural governments and 20 ordinance-designated cities — found that 40%, or 26 of 65 bodies responding to the survey, had instances of complaints, protests and opinions streaming in regarding foreigner policies over the past year. [emphasis added]

The survey specifically asked whether there were cases where complaints and other opinions were frequent, what triggered them and the number of those cases over a one-year period up to the end of September 2025. A total of 65 local governments, excluding the Tokyo Metropolitan Government and the Nara Prefectural Government, replied, with the response rate at 97%.

Of the 26 local bodies that reported experiencing a series of complaints, 15 received fewer than 100 calls or emails across 18 cases, 13 received 100 to fewer than 1,000 calls or emails across 18 cases, and three received 1,000 or more calls or emails across three cases.

The most significant case involved Miyagi Prefecture’s temporary consideration of developing burial grounds with Muslim residents in mind, which drew 2,470 calls and emails including those expressing concerns about the potential impact on water quality and soil.

Several local governments indicated that complaints were driven by unverified or false information on social media.

Of the 26 governments, 19 reported feeling burdened by handling complaints, with Miyagi Prefecture noting instances requiring 1 1/2 to 2 hours to respond and Shizuoka Prefecture revealing that staff were subjected to verbal abuse, causing them to feel scared of answering calls.

While most governments said there was no impact on their policies from a rush of baseless complaints, Shizuoka Prefecture noted increased caution in sending out information on multicultural coexistence policies to avoid complaints. Nara Prefecture, while admitting there were cases where complaints, protests and opinions flooded in, refrained from responding to the survey due to concerns about similar incidents arising from media coverage.

Among the 26 governments, more than 90%, or 24 local bodies, reported an increase in complaints compared to the previous year. As for the reasons, they cited a surge in foreign residents and extensive discussions on foreign nationals during the House of Councillors election in July.

Masami Wakayama, a professor of political science at Hokuriku Gakuin University, pointed out, “The concentration of burdens on local governments may cause them to feel intimidated, potentially reversing the trend toward multicultural coexistence.” He stated, “The current Liberal Democratic Party-led administration is extremely wary of introducing measures as ‘immigration policy’ due to concerns about alienating conservative voters. However, adapting to changing times and society is essential. As demands from residents to local governments increase, there is a growing need to enhance support systems for local bodies, including the development of laws to serve as a basis for their decision-making.”

(Japanese original by Keisuke Muneoka and Mayuka Ikeda, Kyushu News Department)

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外国人施策などへの苦情、自治体の4割に　「電話怖くなった」職員も
社会
毎日新聞 2025/12/19 07:00（最終更新 12/19 07:49）
https://mainichi.jp/articles/20251217/k00/00m/040/345000c

フォート：移民に反対するプラカードを掲げる人たち＝東京都新宿区で2025年11月30日午後2時45分

外国人に関わる施策などを巡り、自治体に苦情が殺到するケースが相次いでいる。毎日新聞が過去1年間に苦情や抗議、意見が相次いだ事例の有無について都道府県と政令市の計67自治体に取材したところ、回答した65自治体のうち4割にあたる26自治体が「あった」と答えた。

2025年9月末までの1年間で、苦情が相次いだ事例の有無やきっかけ、件数などを聞き、東京都と奈良県を除く65自治体が回答した（回答率97％）。

苦情などが相次いだ経験があったと答えた26自治体に寄せられた電話やメールの件数は、100件未満が15自治体18事例▽100件以上1000件未満が13自治体18事例▽1000件以上が3自治体3事例――だった。

最も多かったのは、宮城県が整備を一時検討していた、イスラム教徒らの利用を念頭に置いた土葬墓地に関する事例で、「水質や土壌への影響が不安」などといった電話やメールが2470件程度寄せられた。

在留外国人数の推移
26自治体中19自治体が苦情対応の負担が「あった」と回答。「1時間半から2時間に及ぶ対応を迫られる事例が複数」（宮城県）「（職員が）一方的に暴言を受け、電話に出るのが怖くなった」（静岡県）と明かした。

多くの自治体が根拠のない苦情が殺到することによる施策への影響は「なかった」と回答したが、静岡県は「多文化共生施策に関する情報発信で、苦情を受けないよう配慮をするようになった」と答えた。奈良県は「苦情や抗議、意見が相次いだ事例はあったが、記事で同様の事案が発生することを懸念」と回答を控えた。

苦情が相次いだ26自治体のうち、前年に比べ苦情が「増えた」と答えたのは9割超の24自治体。在留外国人が急増していることや、7月の参院選で外国人に関する議論が多く交わされたことを理由に挙げた。

北陸学院大の若山将実教授（政治学）は「自治体に負担が集中することで萎縮し多文化共生の流れが後退する恐れもある」と指摘。「現在の自民党中心政権では保守層を意識し『移民政策』として施策を打ち出すことを極度に恐れる側面があるが、時代と社会の変化への対応は不可欠だ。住民からの自治体への要望が増えるなか、判断のよりどころとなる法律の整備など自治体の支援体制の拡充が一層求められる」と話す。【宗岡敬介、池田真由香】

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

Miyagi halts Muslim burial site plan amid pushback
THE ASAHI SHIMBUN
September 19, 2025 at 18:49 JST, courtesy of Niklas
https://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/16039254

SENDAI—Miyagi Governor Yoshihiro Murai abruptly scrapped a plan to build burial sites for Muslims on Sept. 18, citing unanimous oppositiion from local mayors–just weeks ahead of the gubernatorial election.

His announcement came during a general session of the prefectural assemby that day, when Murai responded to a question from a member who asked, “Wouldn’t it be appropriate to cancel the plan to avoid further confusion, given the lack of support?”

The proposal, which had been under consideration since late last year, sought to accommodate religious burial practices for foreign workers—but faced strong public opposition and political resistance.

Murai revealed that between Sept. 13 and 17, he had called every mayor in the prefecture to confirm their position.

“All of them said they could not accept the plan, even if the prefecture formally proposed it,” he said.

Under Japan’s cemetery and burial law and prefectural ordinances, new cemeteries require approval from local municipalities.

With no prospect of gaining consent from mayors—the final decision-makers—Murai said, “The situation is extremely difficult, and I have decided to withdraw the plan entirely.”

Just days earlier, on Sept. 12, the governor had responded to a similar question by saying the plan was still in the research phase and undecided. However, that exchange prompted him to seek clarity from local leaders, he said.

Speaking to reporters after the withdrawal announcement, Murai said, “I’ve been struggling with this for quite some time. I concluded that continuing the discussion would only increase anxiety among residents.”

ORIGINS OF THE PLAN

The idea to build burial sites for Muslims emerged as part of Miyagi Prefecture’s efforts to attract foreign workers, particularly from Islamic countries such as Indonesia.

Due to religious beliefs, Muslims cannot be cremated, but Japan has only about 10 cemeteries nationwide that allow burials.

In 2023, the prefectural government signed a memorandum with the Indonesian government to accept more technical interns and skilled workers.

Anticipating a rise in long-term residents, Murai had identified the need to “create a supportive living environment,” including burial options, as a key policy goal.

In October last year, Murai told the prefectural assembly that he wanted to explore building burial sites for Muslims and others who, for religious reasons, do not wish to be cremated. Prefectural staff began visiting existing burial sites outside the prefecture to gather information.

Although Japan does not legally prohibit burials, many municipalities effectively ban them through local ordinances.

In Miyagi, Muslim residents had previously consulted municipal governments about building burial sites, but conditions such as “no impact on the surrounding environment” and “consent from nearby residents” proved difficult to meet.

As a result, families often had to transport bodies to distant burial sites or repatriate them to their home countries.

PUBLIC BACKLASH

When media reported in late December that Murai was considering building burial sites, the prefectural office was flooded with calls and emails expressing concern and opposition.

Comments included, “Is this going to move forward without public input?” “I’m worried about damage to the reputation of local products and environmental impact,” and “I’m uneasy about the increase in foreign residents.”

The prefecture has received more than 2,000 emails and phone calls to date. Approximately half of these reportedly came from outside the prefecture. [emphasis added]

Despite the backlash, Murai initially stood firm. He said the plan was based on requests from Muslim residents and argued, “If we talk about multicultural coexistence, but ignore (burial) needs, that’s a failure of governance. Even if criticized, we must move forward.”

In March, Murai condemned discriminatory social media posts targeting Muslims and reiterated his commitment to the burial site plan.

“Japan originally had a burial culture. Christianity is also based on burial. Even the imperial family used to be buried,” he said.

He emphasized that the issue affected not only foreign residents but also Japanese converts to Islam.

Murai also downplayed environmental concerns: “Wild animals return to the soil naturally. Saying burial causes pollution is an exaggeration.”

Acknowledging the negative reactions, he said, “I’ve received online pushback, but I believe this is necessary.”

ELECTION PRESSURE

The sudden reversal has sparked speculation that Murai’s decision was politically motivated. He is currently serving his fifth term and plans to run for a sixth. Official campaigning will kick off on Oct. 9 and voting is scheduled for Oct. 26.

While the burial site plan was never part of his official campaign platform, some candidates voiced opposition, saying it could lead to increased immigration and should not be led by the prefecture.

Even within the Liberal Democratic Party faction supporting Murai in the gubernatorial election, many members expressed negative views toward the plan.

Murai insisted, “I didn’t withdraw the plan because of the election.”

However, opposition lawmakers say the timing suggests a political calculation.

“He probably realized he couldn’t go into the election with this controversy swirling,” said an opposition assembly member. “Murai isn’t the type to give up after a single phone call. He may have been looking for the right moment to pull back.

COMMUNITY REACTION

“It made me happy that (the prefecture) didn’t just see foreigners as laborers, but actually considered their lives,” said Noboru Sato, 83, a Muslim and representative of the Islamic Cultural Center of Sendai (ICCS). “That’s why this is so disappointing.”

According to Sato, who has led the organization for nearly four decades, the Muslim populations in the prefecture–once made up primarily of international students–now includes workers in the automotive and construction industries, reflecting both steady growth and increasing diversity.

There are only about 10 burial cemeteries in Japan, and none in the Tohoku region. Sato said that many Muslims wish to be buried in their hometowns, but currently must travel to the Kanto or Chubu regions, which is costly and complicated.

Sato and other Muslims had written letters to the governor requesting burial sites.

“Many people aren’t familiar with Muslim culture. Forcing the plan through amid so much criticism wouldn’t be right. I suppose it can’t be helped,” Sato said.

Muhammad Usama, 29, a Pakistani staff member at ICCS, said he understands that the Islamic burial rules may appear to Japanese as a “unique culture.“

At the same time, he added, “Day by day, Japanese people accept Islam” and “understand our religion.”

Sato agreed, saying, “We must continue working to eliminate misunderstandings and prejudice.”

(This article was compiled from reports by Ryo Oyama, Ikuko Abe and Yosuke Fukudome.)

Muslims living in Japan face difficulties burying the dead
May 11, 2022
ENDS
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My SNA Visible Minorities column 71: “Karen Hill Anton’s Willful Ignorance of History” (Dec 1, 2025), on how a self-declared spokesperson on behalf of Japan’s Visible Minorities is hurting them by deliberately ignoring info counter to her narrative

Posted on December 15, 2025December 15, 2025 by Debito Arudou, Ph.D.

mytest

Karen Hill Anton’s willful ignorance of history

A prominent spokesperson within Japan’s foreign community won’t admit racism happens in Japan unless it rises to the level of racism in America. That’s bad science.

By Debito Arudou. Courtesy Shingetsu News Agency, December 1, 2025. Text with links to sources follows under SNA link.

Visible Minorities: Karen Hill Anton’s Willful Ignorance of History

The original fount for this essay with extra links to sources archived at Debito.org here.

If you haven’t heard of Karen Hill Anton, she is well known as commentator on life in Japan. Living in Japan’s countryside since 1975 with an American husband and raising several interracial children, Anton has written and spoken widely on cross-cultural communication, her most famous work being the award-winning memoir “The View from Breast Pocket Mountain” (2020).

Anton’s accomplishments are impressive. Her LinkedIn lists diversity training consultancies at corporations such as Shinsei Bank, Corning Japan, Eli Lilly, and Citigroup. A Freeman Foundation Fellow and Plenary Speaker at JALT 2022, Anton has also been a member of the Jun Ashida Educational Foundation, the Shizuoka Human Rights Association, and the Board of Overseers at Temple University, Japan. Her gigs include 14 years writing the “Crossing Cultures” column for the Japan Times, and another 15 writing the “Another Look” column for the Chunichi Shimbun.

She has even advised the highest levels of the Japanese government, serving on the Internationalization in Education and Society Advisory Councils of Prime Ministers Obuchi and Hashimoto.

I respect this mightily, and said so when I met her at her home in 2024. But I’ve recently discovered her time-honored platform willfully ignores, minimizes, or outright dismisses the experiences of other Non-Japanese (NJ) Residents. That’s what this column is about.

A FLAWED METHODOLOGY TOWARDS RACISM IN JAPAN

In a recent Substack essay, “What Racism is – and isn’t – in Japan” (November 12), she offered herself as an example of a “visible minority,” citing her experiences dealing with people as an African-American woman in Japan.

Despite the essay’s title, Anton notes that Japan does distinguish between people based upon their physical appearance, such as a Japanese shopkeeper who grabbed her dreadlocks and asked if they were real. But for Anton, in Japan it’s more a matter of stupidity, rudeness, or poor behavior in individual interactions, not racism. Defining racism as a systemic, institutionally enforced exclusion from social, educational, or economic participation (as opposed to modern definitions involving the process of differentiation, “othering,” and subordination), Anton concludes that racism is not present in Japan like in the United States.

This sounds plausible until it becomes clear she is working backwards from a conclusion. She claims, “Any foreign child can go to any public school anywhere in Japan.”

That’s manifestly untrue. As reported on Debito.org and in Japanese media for decades, foreign children have been denied entry to Japanese schools. Even Visible Minorities, e.g., international children with Japanese citizenship, get bullied out of the system, as they are a frequent target of Japan’s self-appointed “hair police”—school officials who force children to cut, straighten, or dye their hair or be suspended. That’s why there are ethnic schools in Japan—so these children can somehow get an education.

How can this happen? Because, even using Anton’s definition, of something systemic and institutionally enforced: Japan’s Fundamental Law on Education (Kyouiku Kihon Hou) only guarantees primary and secondary education to citizens (kokumin), and has expressly been cited by authorities to deny foreign children entry.

This is should not be news to Anton, since there is, for example, an underclass of now-grown undereducated South American workers less than an hour’s local train ride from her.

Regardless, Anton narrates a story about her fourth-grade daughter dealing with a classmate who “said something mean” to her. In Anton’s telling, all it took was her husband reporting it to the principal and the very next day the boy’s mother visited the Anton household offering cakes, a flower bouquet, and an apologetic son. Anton concluded, “As far as I was concerned, the matter was finished. There was no victim here.”

Good that all was resolved so well, what with the school administration and the classmate’s parents being so cooperative, and that scars from the experience did not seem to linger in Karen’s child. But this experience is hardly universal. Debito.org has catalogued many cases where the parents of Visible Minorities weren’t so lucky in their experiences either administratively or interpersonally. Some have even resulted in lawsuits with damages awarded, or in suicides. This is all available with a quick Google search, but those facts would spoil Anton’s story.

Anton instead places the onus on NJ Residents to avoid being treated this way: “In the places I’ve called home in Japan, if you follow the rules for putting out your garbage, and participate in community obligations like cutting roadside weeds, it could be said your outward appearance causes no particular problems.”

This is reasonable advice, but not a panacea. It also “could be said” there are systemic barriers (such as “Japanese Only” signs and establishments, legally exclusionary government policies, and even bullying Neighborhood Associations) to Visible Minorities, harassed and excluded no matter how much effort they put into community effort and assimilation. Plenty of journalistic and government surveys evidence the effects of this.

But the biggest flaw in Anton’s essay is her constant minimizing of discrimination in Japan by comparing it to Jim Crow America of the 1950s.

A commenter to Debito.org responded best:

“As a black European in Japan, this habit of American activists to hold racism in the US up as some kind of yardstick is frustrating to say the least. ‘Bad things that happened in the US don’t happen here, therefore there’s no problem,’ is a terrible method of evaluation, not least because the conversation is supposed to be about issues in Japan, no need to drag a different country into it. I’m not the only one whose daily life is a series of frustration and (mostly small) humiliations caused by Japan’s ethnocentrism and resulting racism. ‘At least you’re not getting lynched’ offers no reassurance, it’s only a bizarre way to shift the focus of the conversation to a different, unrelated, topic. It’s like telling a homeless person that they should be glad that at least they’re not terminally ill. Not helpful.”

A WILLFUL IGNORANCE OF HISTORY

What spurred me to write this column was the essay’s conclusion, where Anton discounts a famous 1999 lawsuit by a Brazilian journalist named Ana Bortz. Refused entry into a jewelry store in nearby Hamamatsu, Bortz won in Shizuoka District Court on the grounds of “racial discrimination” (jinshu sabetsu). It was the first court decision acknowledging that discrimination in Japan is in fact racial.

Anton’s take?

ANTON: “The woman, who filed a discrimination lawsuit, and won—as well she should have—was described by a foreign journalist as ‘the Rosa Parks of Japan.’ Rosa Parks? Surely not the same Mrs. Rosa Parks, revered by Americans and people of conscience worldwide, for her courage and principled stance in literally sitting down while standing up to injustice. She succeeded in galvanizing a nation in challenging hundreds of years of oppression and institutionalized racism, protected by law, in the most powerful country on earth. That Rosa Parks? I don’t think so.”

That was the last sentence Anton’s of essay: A straw-man argument that because some lazy journalist compared Bortz to Parks, it’s somehow… not racism… enough?

Two issues: One, I worked with Ana Bortz, and she never compared herself to Parks. Two, Anton here commits an egregious sin of omission. She neglected to mention the subsequent Otaru “Japanese Only” Public Baths Case, which my friends and I took all the way to Japan’s Supreme Court, and where lower courts unanimously upheld the Ana Bortz precedent.

Or the subsequent Steve McGowan Case, where an African and African-American were refused entry to an eyeglass shop, and we caught the manager on tape expressly saying he refused Steve because he is black and he personally hates black people.

Or the Yener Case. Or the Aigi Golf Club Case. Or the umpteen other lawsuits, many successful, regarding racial discrimination. This is disrespectful to the people who toiled for years at great personal cost to fight discrimination.

THE DAMAGE DONE

I blogged a paragraph-by-paragraph critique of Anton’s essay at Debito.org and notified her via her Substack comments. She responded to say, “Anyone who wants to take me down, scold me, disagree with my experience, perspective, and opinion, is free to.” Hours later she deleted my comment. When I followed up to ask why, she wrote, “I do not want to clutter my site.”

When counterarguments are treated as “clutter,” it’s clear that what’s going on here is a willful ignorance of history on a complex topic.

But given her prominent position, Anton’s antics are hurting people.

Another person texted me to say,

“Thank you for calling Karen Anton Hill out. I felt the same after her plenary at JALT a few years ago… The few people I have mentioned this to have not liked me pointing this out about her work. As a darker skinned minority whose kids were brutally bullied, who has experienced real racism, her platform and narrative allows real concerns to be dismissed. Good luck though, she is great at ingratiating herself… and is great at self-promotion. I have learned that I can’t overtly criticize her.”

So I will, with this SNA column. It’s about time.

But why me? Because this denialism goes against all our work. Let me establish some credibility here:

I know about racial discrimination in Japan, particularly towards Japan’s Visible Minorities, to the point where I was awarded a PhD on it in 2014 from Meiji Gakuin University. My doctoral dissertation became monograph Embedded Racism: Japan’s Visible Minorities and Racial Discrimination (Lexington Books, 2015, 2nd Ed. 2022). My other books include “Japanese Only”: The Otaru Hot Springs Case and Racial Discrimination (Akashi Shoten, Inc: English and Japanese 2004, updated 2006 and 2013), and Handbook for Newcomers, Migrants, Immigrants and Immigrants to Japan (coauthored with Akira Higuchi; Akashi Shoten 2008, updated 2012).

I have also maintained Debito.org, an active archive of human rights issues in Japan, since 1995, offering more than thirty years of research and historical record. This includes 15 years of direct fieldwork cataloging “Japanese Only” signs and rules on businesses nationwide in Japan.

My point is this isn’t just my personal experience; I speak with peer-reviewed authority on this subject. That’s why Anton’s column is such a shock—it overwrites a history that people like me have curated over decades to combat the natural revisionism of time.

Granted, we could merely put it down to the shortcomings of a memoirist’s methodology—in other words, “If it didn’t happen to me, it’s not part of my life memoir.” But the blind spot in this methodology is that it dismisses other people’s cases. How many times have you heard naysayers argue something like, “I personally haven’t seen it, so did it really happen? It’s not the Japan I know.”

But there’s ignorance, and then there’s willful ignorance. Even when I presented facts and a historical record counter to her narrative, Anton refused to address any of them. Her retort: “I do not want to engage with you.”

She can, of course, disagree with the case as I presented it, or offer other facts to counter mine. Instead, she chose to just delete it and not engage.

Karen is entitled to her worldview, of course. But if she’s speaking on how to live life in Japan as a self-described “visible minority” advising Japan’s corporate world on issues of diversity and inclusion, even meeting policymakers at the highest levels of Japan’s government, she needs to get it right. She’s not. Instead she promotes a dangerous denialism of how NJ and Visible Minorities experience Japanese society.

DENIALISM AS A MARKETING GIMMICK

When I followed up some more, Anton did respond briefly to say, “I do not hold myself ‘as a template about how to live in Japan’ or anything else. That’s your interpretation. I write about my experience. I do not seek agreement. Ever.”

Yet in public press releases, she has been marketed not only as an “author, columnist, and consultant,” but also as “a model of successful cultural adaptation,” “lecturing widely” as a “bridge between cultures.”

That’s what makes Anton’s schtick a business.

Her whole mindset of, “Just get out there and contribute more to your communities and your skin color won’t matter,” is more gimmick than fact.

But it sells well.

A Japanese policymaker will especially like hearing it’s the foreigners’ fault they aren’t trying hard enough to be accepted. It’s a lot easier than calling for the government to legally guarantee equal treatment and access, or for the dismantling of systems that perpetually differentiate, “other,” and subordinate minorities.

And it’s especially appealing when, even in the clearest cases of discrimination in Japan, a long-term foreigner dismisses them because it’s not like America. Even if this process excuses racism here because it’s worse over there.

It’s classic “whataboutism.” But it works. It’s gotten Anton a seat the table at even the highest levels of government.

It’s also one reason why it’s been difficult to get “Newcomer” Visible Minorities to unite and speak with one voice in the form of, for example, domestic anti-defamation leagues. (The “Oldcomer” ethnic Koreans and Chinese do it much better.) Because spokespeople within the minorities’ own ranks undermine any potential social movement and self-disempower—by saying all we have to do is cooperate and behave. After all, it worked for these spokespeople. They made a life out of it.

For those who think I’m unduly picking on Karen Hill Anton, let the record show I have similarly called out others who pander: Kyoto Seika University President Oussouby Sacko, who similarly denies there is racism in Japan by dumbfoundingly claiming he is treated differently in Japan not because he is black, but because he does not “look Japanese.” Or Japan Times columnist Gregory Clark, who has profiteered mightily from selling Japan’s uniqueness myths in his nationwide speaking tours.

Or journalist Henry Scott-Stokes, who staved off late-life penury by putting his name to books ghostwritten by Japan’s far right denying Japan’s wartime atrocities. Or Tony Laszlo, protagonist of the bestselling “My Darling is a Foreigner” manga series, who completely deleted the online history of our pre-Debito.org activist organization, Issho.org, before it had an impact on his wife’s book sales. I’ve even criticized sacred cows like famed translator Donald Keene, who, on the day of his naturalization into Japan, denigrated NJ residents during a press conference by joking he, unlike them, was not a criminal.

There are lots of people like this in Japan: Ideologues proffering snake-oil narratives that are popular and profitable. Pandering pays. Why wait for Japanese society to toss you a few crumbs from the table? Say what people want to hear and they’ll even give you a seat at it.

THE PLIGHT OF THE COLUMNIST: TO PANDER OR NOT TO PANDER?

One more point: Like Anton, I too have been a columnist for 40 years, including 17 years at the Japan Times, eleven years under the “Just Be Cause” byline. I understand that having a clear and consistent perspective sustains an audience.

But over time the question becomes: How do you keep that audience as you age? Do you continue with the topics that attracted your audience in the first place? Or do you pursue new avenues of inquiry and hope your readers follow?

Either way, you should be open to learning new information, or you’ll just have stale columns running on retreads. But as you absorb new things and get new data, you should be intellectually honest enough to change your mind.

Old stale columnists can fall into a trap of relying on personal experience as a source in itself. After all, the province of the elderly is the sanctity of their memory. Your past is yours to recall and portray. In your own mind, nobody can assail your impressions of what happened to you. Only you witnessed it all.

And memoirists by definition make this their methodology. But you still have to be responsible with your platform, especially if you’re going to talk about a subject as complicated as racism. Be aware of your own limitations. How you’re remembering things. How you’re gathering information. How you’re interpreting the world.

Stories not grounded in history and social science are merely extended anecdotes. A sample size of one.

Yes, memoirists are entitled to their own world. It’s their memoir, after all. But I have a problem when they go outside their world and try to overwrite history (especially one I’ve painstakingly curated) as a marketing gimmick. When they minimize, ignore, deny, or even delete facts and cases because they don’t fit their narrative, that’s not just dogmatism. That’s dishonesty. And when it’s hurting people, it needs to be called out.

Look at the big picture here: Denialism may be Karen Hill Anton’s survival strategy in Japan, but it’s not going to help Japan’s Visible Minorities, the very group she claims to speak for.

Remember that Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi recently rose to power in part by blatantly lying about foreigners kicking park animals. Now watch as Cabinet minister Kimi Onoda (who herself was a dual citizen of Japan and America until she too was called out) finds new ways to scapegoat NJ Residents for Japan’s ills.

All this pandering by NJ spokespeople will mean little in the end. The powers-that-be will still treat you as second-class citizens and residents no matter how hard you try to assimilate.

The onus is not on NJ to scrape for acceptance. The onus is on Japanese society and legal structures to treat all of its legal residents, regardless of citizenship, as human beings with equal rights.

Karen Hill Anton’s methodology doesn’t lend itself to pushing for that. It’s certainly been an effective survival strategy for her, as she’s accomplished a lot for herself. But it should be seen for what it always has been: An isolated sample size of one. Not a template. And as she keeps on keeping on, vigilance: She should not be permitted to minimize, ignore, dismiss, or overwrite the history of other NJ in Japan.

ENDS

======================
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Japan commentator Karen Hill Anton writes on “What Racism is — and isn’t — in Japan” (her Substack, Nov 12, 2025). I critique, as it’s under-researched and willfully ignorant of the historical record. UPDATE: Karen responds on her Substack to say anyone is “free to disagree” with her, then deletes all of our correspondence from her Substack (which I archive as screen captures here)

Posted on November 16, 2025December 23, 2025 by Debito Arudou, Ph.D.

mytest

Debito meets the Hill-Antons, June 5, 2024 — *Debito meets the Hill Antons as a guest at their home, June 5, 2024.*

Hi Blog. Karen Hill Anton, a memoirist, writer, and longtime columnist and commentator on Japan I respect a great deal (and have met in person, which is why I will write about her by her first name), recently wrote something on her Substack that I take great issue with.

The problems I have with the essay I’ll state at the outset:

It’s not only poorly researched. It misrepresents history, distorts the science, and even winds up disrespecting the activists who invested so much of their lives into this issue. In sum, it’s a shock, and threatens to overwrite a history I’ve tried very hard to catalog and keep alive from the natural revisionism of time. And that’s why I’ll take a break from my constant grading and preparing for classes to critique it.

First, let’s establish some credibility. I write as:

— Debito Arudou, Ph.D., Meiji Gakuin University, Tokyo, 2014. My doctoral dissertation became the monograph of Embedded Racism: Japan’s Visible Minorities and Racial Discrimination (Lexington Books, 2015, 2nd Ed. 2022); my other monographs include “Japanese Only”: The Otaru Hot Springs Case and Racial Discrimination (Tokyo: Akashi Shoten, Inc: English and Japanese 2004, updated 2006 and 2013). I have also maintained Debito.org, this archive of human rights issues in Japan, since 1995, meaning more than thirty years of research and historical record, including 15 years of fieldwork cataloging “Japanese Only” signs and rules on businesses nationwide in Japan. My point is that I speak with some accredited authority on this topic beyond just my personal experience.

I will put Karen’s article in boldface, then intersperse my comments:

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

What Racism Is — and Isn’t — in Japan
Reflections from fifty years as a “visible minority” — and why I don’t call it racism
KAREN HILL ANTON
NOV 12, 2025

Courtesy https://karenhillanton.substack.com/p/what-racism-is-and-isnt-in-japan/

I’ve long read and heard about how the Japanese discriminate against people who look different from them, especially “visible minorities”.

DEBITO: I’m not sure if she’s read my books above on Visible Minorities. She has not defined her term or offered any reflection on the science behind it. If you as a serious author going to have a serious conversation about a topic this complicated, you must demonstrate you have done the background research and are qualified to talk about it. “Long read and heard” aren’t real qualifications.

As I am clearly a visible minority, here are some of my reflections and experiences during the years I’ve lived in Japan, 1975 to the present.

DEBITO: Already, this is starting off as an essay grounded in Karen’s reflections based upon her personal experience. I see this as part of Karen’s general methodology as a memoirist: Her data set is her experience. That’s fine within the scope of a personal memoir. The problem with grounding your social science this way is that it leads a blind spot common in people, especially NJ Residents who willfully choose to ignore the evidence of what happens to other NJ, who tend to dismiss claims and cases as, “But it’s never happened to me.” Bear that in mind as we look at the methods of gathering evidence for the rest of this essay:

The majority of the time I’ve lived here has been in a village, or small town. I imagine the experience of foreigners who live in the great metropolis Tokyo, for example, might be significantly different from my own.

In the places I’ve called home in Japan, if you follow the rules for putting out your garbage, and participate in community obligations like cutting roadside weeds, it could be said your outward appearance causes no particular problems.

DEBITO: “It could be said.” That’s an interesting way to phrase it. But it could also be said that there are systemic barriers (such as “Japanese Only” signs and establishments, explicitly exclusionary government policies, even bullying Neighborhood Associations) to Visible Minorities being harassed and excluded no matter how much effort they put into community effort and assimilation into Japanese society. Plenty of journalistic and government surveys evidence the effects of this, which is why we need more science behind this facile generalization.

Still, it would be unusual, and highly unlikely, if I’d never had a negative experience regarding my observable physical characteristics.

Like the time a shopkeeper came out from behind the counter as I was about to pay, caught up a bunch of my hair, which was in dreadlocks, in her hands and, while holding it, looked at the woman I was with, and, addressing her, said: “Is this real?”

The woman I’d gone to the store with, a fellow volleyball mom (we’d just dropped off a carload of junior high girls at a local tournament), duly mortified, was completely speechless. After all, what could she have answered?

“I too am curious. Why don’t we ask the person to whom the hair belongs?”

I took the shopkeeper’s hand by the wrist, removed it from my hair and said in a voice as cold as Arctic ice: “It’s real. Don’t touch it.”

I wasn’t sure if this woman had lost her mind or just her manners. Although I am not capricious in attributing bad intentions to anyone, I will not tolerate poor behavior. Talk about being impolite, I call that kind of behavior rude and offensive. I’d also call that woman ignorant, insensitive, and inconsiderate. No matter how different I may look, I am not an inanimate object.

I would not, however, call this woman a “racist.” That’s the term an American man I know used when I told hm this story. No, it wasn’t a “racist” act. It was a stupid one.

DEBITO: Okay, so this sort of targeting has happened to Karen, and she acknowledges it. But she conclusively dismisses it as based upon stupidity rather than the process of racism. And then shoehorned in that the racist claim is somehow grounded in a foreign context (“an American man”). The underlying sentiment, as you will see as we read on, is “It’s not as bad as racism in America,” as if that is some yardstick. However, modern scholars of racism do not see it as a matter of degree, or else you get into a “discrimination Olympics”, and the worst countries get held up to excuse the smaller permutations of racism elsewhere with “whataboutism“. Even the most ancient scholars of modern racism (such as W.E.B. DuBois, Souls of Black Folk, 1905) see it not as a matter of definition (which is harder to nail down), but rather a process.

In other words, don’t get bogged down on what race and racism is. Rather, focus on what racism does. As such, modern scholars of racism talk about the process of “differentiation, othering, and subordination” (cf. Miles, Racism after ‘Race Relations‘, 1995). And that was in process with Karen’s hair example. It just didn’t reach the subordination stage because this stupid person apparently didn’t have the power to refuse Karen service. If she had, I assume we’d have the full range of motion that might even qualify under Karen’s worldview. Maybe Japan’s notorious “hair police” in schools would qualify.

Any foreign child can go to any public school anywhere in Japan. If they could not, if they were prevented from attending because of their skin color, and because they were deemed an “inferior race” — I’d call that racism.

DEBITO: Good. Now we know what you would call racism. Now do the research: School exclusions based upon race, ethnicity, and nationality happen in Japan. That’s why we have so many ethnic schools for children with international roots. So kids excluded and bullied out of Japanese schools can still get an education.

If it required armed officers of the law to ensure these children could go to school unmolested, as was once the situation in the country of my birth — the United States of America — they would clearly be victims of racism. It’s almost hard to believe now that there was a time when American children were harassed, threatened, intimidated, physically and verbally abused, simply trying to go to school.

DEBITO: America as the international racism yardstick again. Yes, that happened in America, and it’s a reflection of racist policies. But that’s happened in Japan too. How about the Japanese police raiding and shutting down Korean Schools in 1948? It’s from the same time period of the incident mentioned above (1957). You cite that, I’ll cite this. And it was the opposite course — the government itself was harassing, threatening, intimidating, and abusing these kids simply trying to go to school.

Racism systematically and effectively shuts out and excludes persons or groups from the social, educational, and economic mainstream.

When this system is forcibly maintained by tradition, and institutionalized by law, it is oppression.

DEBITO: But it’s still the process of “differentiation, othering, and subordination”. And it is institutionalized by law. The very Fundamental Law on Education (Kyouiku Kihon Hou) in Japan doesn’t guarantee access to education to foreigners — only to citizens — and that has been cited to systematically and effectively shut out and exclude NJ from getting a basic education in Japanese schools. That’s why there is an uneducated Brazilian underclass that fell through the cracks (as seen in Hamamatsu, a 42-minute local train ride from Karen’s house). Likewise, how about the Supreme Court ruling in 2014 that NJ Residents systemically and systematically don’t qualify for the welfare programs they paid their taxes into?

I could go on. But I shouldn’t have to. It’s been cataloged on Debito.org for 30 years now, there for people who are willing to do the research beyond one’s own personal experiences.

All this, under modern definitions of racism that go beyond seeing American racism and Western “race relations”, still qualifies as racism, not merely “oppression”. That’s why people should do some scholarship on the complicated topic before speaking aloud and workshopping ill-defined ideas.

PHOTO CAPTION: From left: Lila 璃羅 Mario 眞理雄 Nanao 奈々緒 Mie 美枝
My four children, born and raised in rural Japan, never had a foreign friend, playmate, or classmate when they were growing up here. They were always the only foreign children in their schools and our neighborhood. (Nanao, the eldest, was born in Denmark.)

This did not present any significant problems. Although it seems young children desire nothing more than to be like their friends — and have no desire to stand out, by looks, language, or anything else.

One day my second daughter, Mie, then in fourth grade, came home in tears, saying a boy in her class had said something mean to her regarding her [brown] skin color. I do not remember what he said, but recall it was offensive enough for my husband to report it to the principal.

The very following day, the boy’s mother, with her son in tow, (I noted he was dressed in a white collared shirt) came to our door. Bowing deeply in apology (and she was practically in tears), she offered me a flower bouquet, and a gift. I, keenly aware she was upset, bowed in return, as I accepted her apology, along with her gift of small cakes.

No ill feelings. As far as I was concerned, the matter was finished. There was no victim here. I thought of it as a lesson. Our daughter learned we would not let any act of bullying or offensive behavior go unaddressed. The boy would learn how he brought distress and embarrassment to his family and his school. As well as shame, a powerful deterrent to poor behavior in Japanese society.

DEBITO: I am pleased that all was resolved so well, with the school admin and the kids’ parents being so cooperative, and that scars from the experience did not seem to linger in Karen’s children. Bravo. But this experience is hardly universal, and I can cite plenty of other cases where the parents of Visible Minorities weren’t so lucky in their experiences either administratively or interpersonally. Some have even resulted in lawsuits with damages awarded.

Again, I see this is the blind spot of the memoirist. If it didn’t happen in their experience, it doesn’t make the memoir. But plenty of evidence attests that this methodology discounts or dismisses different experiences.

Now get a load of the conclusion to this essay:

There was an incident a some years ago in Japan when racism was charged in a civil suit against a shopkeeper who did not want a Brazilian woman in his jewelry store. The woman, who filed a discrimination lawsuit, and won — as well she should have — was described by a foreign journalist as “the Rosa Parks of Japan.”

Rosa Parks? Surely not the same Mrs. Rosa Parks, revered by Americans and people of conscience worldwide, for her courage and principled stance in literally sitting down while standing up to injustice. She succeeded in galvanizing a nation in challenging hundreds of years of oppression and institutionalized racism, protected by law, in the most powerful country on earth. That Rosa Parks? I don’t think so. ENDS

DEBITO: And that’s where my pencil dropped. This is where the essay ends? With the “Straw-Man Argument” that the plaintiff in this case, Ana Bortz, is not Rosa Parks? Therefore what happened to Bortz is not racism?

(By the way, even The Guardian calls this narrative of Rosa Parks a “fable”.)

This is why the tone in this critique is annoyed, not cajoling. It’s willful ignorance and misrepresentation of the historical record during and after. As seen in many long-term commentators (such as Daniel Kahl and others) who simply refuse to do the research.

I knew Ana Bortz. I worked with her for years. Catalogued her case on Debito.org.

Bortz never compared herself to Parks.

So why cite this hack journalist’s lazy sloganeering as a means to dismiss her case as basically incomparable to an American example? A comparison nobody really made is somehow cited as proof that Bortz’s case is not racism… enough?

(UPDATE: It turns out that even Anton’s recounting of what the journalist actually said is likely untrue.)

That’s manifestly incorrect. Even Bortz’s judge expressly ruled that it was “racial discrimination” under the UN CERD. How disrespectful to Ana Bortz’s work!

But note what was left out by ending the essay there. No mention of the Otaru Onsens Case, which we took all the way to Japan’s Supreme Court, and where lower courts unanimously ruled that “Japanese Only” signs ARE “racial discrimination” (jinshu sabetsu). Or the Steve McGowan Case, where an African and African-American were refused entry to a store, and we caught the manager on tape expressly saying he refused Steve because he is black and he personally hates black people. Or the Yener Case. Or the Aigi Golf Club Case. Or any mention of the umpteen other lawsuits, many successful, regarding racial discrimination? (Summarized in one essay here.) How disrespectful to them as well!

When we met a year and a half ago for dinner, Karen and I talked about this issue in some detail, and there were no altercations or dismissive language between us.

But if a respected writer is going to make claims in writing as grand as these to a broader audience, do the research. It’s not hard. Decades of work and publications are but a Google search away.

If you don’t, you wind up paving over history with ahistorical revisionism that we’re already seeing on Karen’s Substack comments section. This is how ignorance proliferates.

Karen has seen all this happen in real time to other people, but ignores it because it doesn’t fit into her memoir. That’s just not good social science.

Last word: This was a disappointing tossed-off essay from someone who should write better. And that’s why I’m responding: I’m not going to let an influential commentator on Japan overwrite history just because it doesn’t fit her personal narrative on Japan.

Debito Arudou, Ph.D.

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

UPDATE NOV 21, 2025:

I responded to Karen. I posted the conclusion to this essay on Karen’s Substack comments section to this article, with a link back to this page. Screenshot as evidence:

(link to this blog entry at the bottom cut off)

Karen kindly responded, saying that those who disagree with her are *free to”:

(This screen capture is from an email notification from Substack.)

Less than a day later, my post and her response were deleted from Karen’s Substack.

I guess we’re “free to” disagree as long as it doesn’t intrude into Karen’s Substack narrative.

Even if she had left it up, note that her argument that she “didn’t mean to demean or denigrate Ana Bortz” could apply to anyone who wrongs anyone. Including those who touch her hair. “I didn’t mean it.” But again, it’s easier to dismiss potential racists as merely “stupid” (and compare it to racism in America) than to challenge a system that defends and encourages them. It’s easier to ignore and deny history than to research it.

My takeaway from this event is that willful omission is the MO behind this world view. A deliberate short-sightedness. No mention again in Karen’s response of the Otaru Onsens Case or anything any other case I mentioned beyond Ana Bortz. To Karen, as long as you put in the effort to contribute to your community, anything bad that happens is I guess your fault because you didn’t put in enough effort somehow. No amount of clear-cut examples to the contrary shall be factored in. They’ll even be deleted.

But for someone who continuously holds herself up as a template for how to live in Japan, both in writing and in her public speeches to places like JALT, this is dangerous behavior. I’ve already had one person contact me directly to say, “As a darker skinned minority whose kids were brutally bullied, who has experienced real racism, her platform and narrative allows real concerns to be dismissed.”

Karen is welcome to her worldview, of course. But when it becomes a means for other people to ignore (or, in this case, outright delete) history, this isn’t just poor social science. This is dangerous denialism. And it deserves to be called out. Debito Arudou, Ph.D.

SECOND UPDATE, DEC 5, 2025:

Karen Hill Anton has since deleted ALL of our correspondence, including the follow-up exchanges, from her Substack. She calls it “clutter”. I guess counterarguments would indeed clutter her mind and her narrative, which is now verifiably and firmly rooted in denialism. Why brook dissent when it undermines her brand? Screen captures for the record again. Sincerely, Debito Arudou, Ph.D.

Image 1: My followup after Karen deleted my comment archived above:

Image 2: My answer to her short answer:

Image 3: Karen’s short answer, then my response to that:

Image 4: Finally, Karen’s final answer before she deleted this exchange entirely.

Image 5: How the site looks now after all the deletions of the record. Nothing left but the subsequent comment from Frederick Stimson Harriman you saw above. Karen’s comment underneath that is also indicative.

ARCHIVE ENDS

Last word: As another person wrote to me personally on this case (identifying information redacted):

—————————-

“Gawd, thank you. I felt gaslit with my assessment and reaction to her work. I checked the comments to her substack and her responses. As someone with a graduate degree in [a social science], I question how she got the work she did. She appears to be anti-DEI and has survivorship bias when it comes to race issues. You are someone who is an academic in the field you publicly write about, so responding to her article as you did even though you met her is redeeming and it feels like you have given me a voice.

An older Chinese woman I know who has spent more time in Japan than China was recently shoved and told to go back home. I mentioned this as a concern of rising aggression to friends and their response was that it was nothing, the person likely had mental issues etc. not wanting to discuss it intellectually. It represented another first hand ground level anecdote to how attacking, delegitimizing the field the field you research has shifted from being pushed by the far right to being normalised. I work in the field as well and it guts me how narrative is being manipulated to benefit those in privileged positions. You are doing good work and it gives me faith that some are willing to punch through the BS wall built by the people who benefit from dividing us.”

THIRD UPDATE DECEMBER 22, 2025

Karen Hill Anton responded on her Substack to another supportive comment (after deleting a few more critical ones, or course) from an editor I locked horns with a few decades ago. Her response is within character. I guess “engaging with me directly” means keeping my counterarguments to her only despite her public post. It’s an ironic use of “coward”, and a fallback to her methodology of “I can write whatever I want because it’s my personal experience,” never mind doing research on and being honest about the historical record on an issue so complex. The self-promotion schtick at the expense of others will no doubt continue. And I’ll probably have to keep calling it out. Archiving this again for the record:

My SNA Visible Minorities column 70: “Takaichi’s PM Election Changes My Projections”, on how I have to recant my previous column because this new LDP party leader and probable PM is bad news (Oct 8, 2025).

Posted on October 5, 2025October 10, 2025 by Debito Arudou, Ph.D.

mytest

Hi Blog. I have to eat some crow. As I state below, PoliSci is very inexact science, and when new data comes in, I have to change my assessment. I didn’t expect a far-right troll like Takaichi Sanae to become the LDP’s next party leader and probable PM. Now that she is, I have to follow up with a new assessment, which is that she is bad news for Japan’s diversity and democracy itself.

Again, intellectual honesty requires candor and a change of mind when necessary. It’s necessary now. Debito Arudou, Ph.D.

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TAKAICHI’S PM ELECTION CHANGES MY PROJECTIONS

The recent election of Sanae Takaichi as leader of the LDP probably means Japan’s first woman PM. But this a huge step back for Japan’s democracy and diversity.

By Debito Arudou. Shingetsu News Agency, Visible Minorities Column 70, October 8, 2025

Courtesy https://shingetsunewsagency.com/2025/10/08/visible-minorities-takaichis-pm-election-changes-my-projections/

I hate to do it, but I have to retract something I wrote earlier.

In my previous column, “Japan’s Rightward Swing is Overblown” (SNA, August 26, 2025), I argued that an outsider “Japan First” party (Sanseito) was getting a lot of media attention for its blatant xenophobia posing as public policy. But I argued the hype about their showing in the August Upper House Elections was undue because Sanseito remained structurally far from power.

My underlying argument was, “Don’t feed the trolls. Sanseito thrives on this kind of attention.” After all, no real political transition had taken place. Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party, the most successful political party in history at staying in power and destroying rival parties, was still in power with Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba in place. Moreover, the LDP over decades had been doing what Sanseito was noisily advocating all along, only quieter. Beyond the hype, Sanseito was saying nothing new.

Alas, my column has not aged well.

A MONTH IS A LONG TIME IN POLITICS

Ishiba has since resigned his post and the LDP has had new elections for party leader. Stump speeches between successor candidates fell for the anti-foreigner hype and launched a foreigner-bashing olympics. Eventually the extremist candidate won, despite her weird past policy positions, overtly racist statements, and lying about, of all things, foreigners assaulting deer in a park.

Say hello to Sanae Takaichi, the LDP’s new leader and likely Japan’s first female PM.

But don’t celebrate Japan finally choosing a female. In Japan’s long history of women vying for the PM post — from opposition party leader but panderer to the LDP Takako Doi, to outspoken reformer but alleged foreigner Renho — Takaichi has prevailed. The problem is, her world view has been warped by Japan’s systemic sexism, and her policies ironically will only make things worse for her ilk.

Consider the Japanese metaphor (from the opening frame of “Barefoot Gen”) of how if wheat gets trampled down constantly, it eventually shoots back up with even stronger roots. In a society where women of talent have to work twice as hard to get half of what men do, women like Takaichi emerge far more resilient and studious of the rules of engagement in male-dominated societies.

That’s why Takaichi is particularly scary. Not only because she clearly can play the game, but also because, in her thirst for power, she learned the authoritarian playbook better than most.

DISCRIMINATION CREATES MONSTERS

Jake Adelstein’s recent substack polemic, “The Rise of Japan’s Female Trump,” has the receipts. Please read it for yourself, but let me crib:

The new rules of engagement were created by the far-right Brahmin Shinzo Abe before he was assassinated. Famously heralded as “Trump before Trump,” PM Abe captured state broadcaster NHK and cowed unfavorable media with threats of lawsuits and denied access (even getting columnists critical of Japan like me fired from the Japan Times). He began remilitarizing Japan to aggravate the balance of power in East Asia. He launched domestic economic policies that increased social inequality and only heightened people’s politics of grievance. He undermined Japan’s pacifist Constitution and even the concept of human rights itself. And he sucked up to and enabled Trump as an unconditional ally on the international stage.

Most importantly, as far as this column space goes, Abe parlayed a fear of outsiders (particularly Chinese) into policy drives while ironically opening Japan up to their tourists, which in turn fanned a xenophobia he found useful. His ultimate goal was to return to an era when elites (like his family) ran the place like a divine, racially superior nation. He succeeded well enough to inspire a future generation of proteges.

Hence Takaichi is Abe Redux, except as a commoner with Imposter Syndrome. She’s more vocal about Abe’s worst ideas in order to seek the approval of the Nippon Kaigi clique. On the kooky side, she has claimed divine inspiration for her political aspirations and sees Japanese as genetically superior life forms. She has also openly advocated learning from Hitler (yes, by name) about how to win elections and then overturn democratic institutions through “emergency measures” against newfound enemies. In other words, find your monsters and then go do something monstrous.

She’s already found boogeymen in the oddest corners — for example, foreign deer kickers in Nara, or foreigners escaping criminal charges due to a lack of police interpreters — stories that turned out to be as fictitious as Trump’s “they’re eating the cats, they’re eating the dogs” lie.

Yet these easily certifiable lies didn’t disqualify him, or her. In the old days, Prime Ministers got in international trouble for saying things like “blacks, Puerto Ricans, and Mexicans make the average IQ score in America exceedingly low” (Yasuhiro Nakasone). Not anymore, and not just because of Trump. In an information economy where fear and rumor spread far faster than the fact-checker, stoking xenophobia remains an effective strategy.

And with the number of foreign tourists and residents at record levels, we get a perpetual positive feedback loop — especially if you don’t distinguish between tourist and resident. Just focus on any real or perceived slight from by a Visible Minority in your neighborhood or local convenience store, claim they’re part of an invading horde here to destabilize our society, and you can simultaneously claim victim and savior status for yourself.

What’s next? Emergency edicts to save Japan from being undermined by rapacious outsiders? As I mentioned earlier, this has been a mantra for Japan’s far-right for decades, only quieter. This time we have loud and clear policy drives not only to curtail tourism, but also to end immigration (such as it is?) and international exchange programs. That’s just for starters. Trickle-down effects are stories about people being targeted on the street and afraid to go outside for fear of actual violence from angry strangers.

But these xenophobic slogans aren’t simply to garner votes in the short term. They are part of a fascist playbook they know will work in the long term, because they have in other countries. The politics of grievance here have firm and specific targets.

But back to Takaichi in particular. Having clawed her way to the top and bested all her detractors, she will probably be as ruthless towards her targets as Japanese society has been towards her. She’s not going to empathize with fellow women and minorities and try to make things better for them. She will lord it over them with particular vim as a victorious survivor.

That’s why I’m going to have to recant my previous column. I was probably blinded by how comparatively bad it’s getting in America (my current focus of teaching) and how fast it’s going down the authoritarian slope. I guess I saw Japan as a milder example that hadn’t tipped yet. No longer.

Of course, if I try hard enough, I can come up with “calm-down caveats” like last column. For example, Takaichi’s election as LDP leader was not at all a slam-dunk; she was nowhere near a majority in the first round of party ballots, and she only narrowly beat off her rival in a second runoff election. And as of this writing, she’s still not PM, because other members of the ruling coalition haven’t voted her in yet. It’s still unclear whether the more moderate alliance party Komeito will stomach her.

But either way, with the power she now has over the LDP, I can very easily see Takaichi making a new political alliance with Sanseito and taking things down an even darker path.

POLI SCI AS AN INEXACT SCIENCE

This is one of the issues Political Scientists have with parliamentary systems like Japan’s. A country’s leader is not voted in by the population in general (like presidents), but rather by a local constituency, and the rest of the party later remotely chooses their leader who goes on to be PM. Fringe candidates and firebrands do sometimes go all the way to Wembley. That’s what happened with Takaichi.

And this firebrand will just keep pointing to any handy foreigner infraction (ignoring the iconoclastic Japanese doing the same), loudly foreigner-bash to drown out any economic bad news, and channel the results into policies to enforce conformity and tamp down on dissent. Put “Japan First” to “save the country” from conditions that the LDP, the party in charge for most of Japan’s Postwar Era, are in fact responsible for. The templates are all there — even something as extreme as sealing Japan off from foreign entry (as the government did during Covid) has precedent!

And if she fails? She won’t disappear. Ruthless politicians clawing their way to power will do anything to preserve it. No doubt she’ll dedicate the rest of her life to making things as miserable as possible for foreigners and “anti-Japanese” minority voices. It’s now her brand. And there are other proteges to take up the mantle.

So how much damage to Japan’s democracy can Takaichi do? Quite a lot if she adopts that well-tested modern authoritarian playbook. Yes, parliamentary governments can collapse with a single scandal, and Takaichi may just be a flash in the pan. But at this point, my making an assessment like this feels Pollyannish.

Japan has always been susceptible to the fear of foreigners coming in and destroying its essence. That’s the very reason Japan became a country in the first place!

Last word: Let me say oops. A month in politics is a long time and Political Science is an inexact science. In the spirit of intellectual honesty and candor, I have no problem changing my mind once new data comes in. Takaichi’s election changes my assessments significantly.

Something wicked for the world’s democracies still this way comes. This time it’s Japan’s turn.

ENDS

My SNA Visible Minorities col 69: “Japan’s Rightward Swing is Overblown” (Aug 24, 2025), on how the emergence of Sanseito shouldn’t be ignored but it doesn’t deserve the media hype, as its ideas are neither new nor well-planned

Posted on August 25, 2025September 7, 2025 by Debito Arudou, Ph.D.

mytest

Hi Blog. Here’s my latest column on the Japan Upper House Elections last month, developing something I wrote before the elections. I’ve decided that, despite all the feedback on Debito.org saying we should be alarmed, I’m offering a shrug. Hear me out, below. I look forward to more of your feedback. Debito Arudou, Ph.D.

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THE JULY 2025 *RIGHTWARD-SWING” ELECTION IS OVERBLOWN

Yes, there is a new far-right party in Japan. But at this point the media hype about Sanseito is sensationalism, as what it’s offering is neither new nor well-planned.

By Debito Arudou, Shingetsu News Agency Visible Minorities column 69, August 24, 2025

Visible Minorities: Japan’s Rightward Swing is Overblown

By the time I had completed my column last month, Japan had its July 20, 2025, Upper House Elections. They deserve comment in this space, but not for the reasons you might expect.

The major takeaway was the ruling conservative parties (the Liberal Democratic Party and Komeito) lost seats, while the opposition parties on the right, left, and center generally gained.

Notably, for the first time since the LDP was founded in 1955, the party lost its ruling majority in both the Upper and Lower Houses of Parliament. This meant they had to expand their coalition to stay in power. Which they did—Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba stayed PM.

So my read is that we’ll have to wait and see whether Japan’s parliamentary system will become as fragile as, say, Postwar Italy’s has been, with elections every few months (until recently) as coalitions fail.

My read is pretty milquetoast. But that’s not what the media shouted about.

SANSEITO AS THE NEXT BIG POLITICAL MOVEMENT?

The headlines were dominated by the rise of new far-right party called Sanseito, a “burgeoning” “election force” that “won big” and became “the talk of the town”.

Sanseito nakedly trumpeted Trump themes by campaigning on a *Japan First* strategy, singling out foreigners as the cause of Japan’s woes, and promising all manner of xenophobic policies to further disenfranchise, penalize, limit if not expel Non-Japanese. Their essential point is that foreign residents aren’t real members of Japanese society—even if they naturalize—and should never be entitled to equal access to the things they pay taxes for or are guaranteed under the constitution.

Now, one would expect that I would be “doing a Debito” here, megaphoning from the rooftops about a new era where Japan is becoming fascist.

But I’m actually going to argue the froth is a bit overblown. I won’t go so far as to tell people to ignore Sanseito, but this election is more a case study of media hype than of a definitive political shift. Because Sanseito is saying nothing new and still has no real power.

SANSEITO GAINED SEATS, BUT…

First, let’s start with a sense of scale. Sanseito is now at 15 seats in the Upper House, up from only a single seat before the election. It did punch above its weight in terms of total votes from constituencies and proportional representation votes. But that’s really the strongest case you can make for a new rightward swing in Japan.

But in terms of raw numbers, in a chamber of 248 seats, Sanseito only occupies six percent of them. It still remains only the sixth largest party in the Upper House. That’s not really power-broker or even swing-voter status yet. They can’t, for example, submit budget bills involving public spending until they reach 20 seats.

Second, bear in mind that the Upper House is the less powerful of the two chambers anyway. In my experience, the Lower House is where the serious politicians dwell and have tugs-of-war with the ministerial mandarins, who are the real policymakers in Japan. The Upper House, however, is where the celebrity, larker, clown, and dilettante candidates have some fun before they rubber-stamp what’s tossed up to them.

That means that Sanseito is right where they belong—in the clown-car fringe-party zone that every developed parliamentary system provides venting voters.

SANSEITO IS IN FACT NOT SAYING ANYTHING NEW

Sanseito has indeed said outlandish (and outright false) things about the foreign element in Japan, proffering propaganda that is hateful, overt, and unabashed. I have no doubt that if in power, they would relish sticking it to anyone who doesn’t fall under their definition of *true Japanese* (including ideologically). They are not merely authoritarians who want to dominate by any means necessary. They are fascists, in that they imbue their populism with racist and ethnocentric ideologies, and they would dismantle democracy with a smile.

But I’ve written about Japan’s politicians for decades now, and for all of Sanseito’s racist statements, every single one of them I’ve seen in other parties and candidates, both in slogans during elections and while in office afterwards. Bigotry was always intrinsic, for example, to ruling LDP policy proposals (recall Nippon Kaigi in the highest echelons of elected government), and it went down easily with the fearful and ignorant.

Now recall how blatantly racist former Tokyo Governor Shintaro Ishihara was, and re-elected to power for decades. Then factor in the decades of prejudicial performance art in prefectural representatives, city mayors, neighborhood associations, local assemblies, etc. Unlike Sanseito, these people were in positions of real power to craft actual xenophobic public policies. And they did.

And how about the regularized racial profiling and search-and-seizure powers (sometimes with deadly force) of the Japanese police? The local businesses putting up unconstitutional yet completely legal “Japanese Only” signs? The unfettered racist landlords who make every apartment hunt an ordeal for Visible Minorities? And the constant drumbeat of “We Japanese* exclusionary narratives in Japanese media?

That’s why you get constant alienation as the rule rather than the exception in Japan, whether as part of political sloganeering or merely as part of daily life for Japan’s foreign residents.

In other words, it’s not much of a leap from *Japanese Only* to *Japan First*—either in terms of content or intent.

Given that “Japanese Only” signs have been around verifiably since 1992, and Japan still hasn’t made them illegal despite signing international treaty in 1996, I could argue that Sanseito have been laggards, behind the curve for more than thirty years.

My point is that Sanseito is nothing new. What’s new is the LDP is now being seen as part of the problem by Japan’s reactionaries.

It was the government’s bright idea to bring in all those foreigners as laborers and tourists to man convenience stores and shake Japan’s moneymaker.

But I’m not being sarcastic here. It was a bright idea. “Cool Japan” etc. has been a resounding success. The Japanese economy has grown so dependent on foreign inflow that even the LDP has changed its tune, denouncing discrimination and prejudice (while also tossing out some right-wing chum to lure some votes away during the election). Clearly that strategy didn’t work.

WHO’S MORE WORRIED ABOUT SANSEITO? THE MEDIA

So Sanseito’s rise isn’t altogether unexpected. It’s what you get when voters feel their regular valve for voting their regular pet grievances has disappeared. It’s a protest vote.

But it’s not clear this is a bellwether of a sustainable social movement, as plenty of dead parties in Japanese politics can attest.

So why did we get the big headlines? Because of the rise of the Global Far Right.

America, despite being the world’s flagship “arsenal of democracy,” is turning fascist.

Accordingly, hot-fingered journalists are asking whether Japan is the next domino of rising xenophobic parties, as seen in Hungary’s Orban, Italy’s Meloni, Britain’s Brexit, Netherlands’ Wilders, France’s Le Pen, Germany’s AfD, or India’s Modi.

Yet, as argued above, Japan’s politics has been politically ethnostatist for decades. It’s just now the media has a peg and a fringe party to hang their articles on.

So despite all that, Sanseito still has no real power to change anything. Yet.

WHEN SHOULD WE WORRY ABOUT SANSEITO?

As noted by scholars of how modern democracies die (see for example Levitsky and Ziblatt’s groundbreaking work), we should fear political pendulum swings when the pendulum cannot swing back, i.e., when the opposition can never take a turn again at leadership because they have been systemically shut out of power forever.

This happens when the anti-democrats voted into office have concrete plans for domination, not just populist slogans.

For example, they make unconstitutional activities legal by targeting people’s civil rights, “capture referees” by stacking judiciaries and politicizing the civil service, sideline the opposition by portraying political rivals as evil and unentitled to power, and dismantle institutions offering checks and balances that fetter fascists with the rule of law.

Sanseito is nowhere near that threshold of planning. They have scribbled out some rewarmed prewar ideas about constitutional reforms and enforcing patriotism (again, all LDP policies that didn’t cause such alarm before), and some populist slogans about restoring traditional family values, lowering taxes, excluding foreigners, restoring the primacy of the Emperor, etc.

Yes, some worrisome stuff incompatible with a modern democracy. But it’s nothing as workable as the U.S. Heritage Foundation’s 920-page “Project 2025.” Read it sometime and see how granular it is.

Plus if Sanseito went from fringe to real power, they would have to face the formidable Japanese bureaucracy, which has steered Japan basically from its inception. It’s even more siloed and impenetrable than the one Trump is dismantling.

That’s why, even in Japan’s one-party state, Japan’s Diet Members do not draft policy. Even PM Cabinet Members are expected to listen to what’s going on in their ministries but never touch the controls. You’d need a lot of pages in your Project 2025 to tackle that.

THE NEXT STEPS: BIRDS OF A FEATHER

What is worrisome is that in Sanseito, finally the Global Far Right has someone they can relate to.

Both Trump and Steve Bannon tried hobnobbing with their far-right hero, former PM Shinzo Abe, and only got so far. After all, in terms of staying in power, Japan’s LDP is the most successful political party in any liberal democracy, and as such is as institutionalized as the mandarins at maintaining the status quo.

But the next steps are in progress. This was seen when the U.S. Republican Party adopted Hungary’s Orban’s tactics for consolidating control, representatives of the Global Far Right have already met with Sanseito and offered their playbook.

One could also argue that Japan is more susceptible to the appeal of fascism. It’s much easier for the latent bigotry of “Japan First” to sell to a public that intuitively believes it anyway.

Those are the warning signs. But I still believe we’re not there yet. Even the LDP is talking with the leftist Constitutional Democratic Party to preserve ideological centrism, which is how other imperiled democracies have historically warded off their authoritarians.

CONCLUSION: WAIT AND SEE

That’s why my conclusion is that the alarmist headlines about last month’s elections are premature. it will take a few more elections for the staying power of Sanseito to become clear.

After all, it took Trump’s operatives ten years to learn how they could fix the system in their favor forever.

And despite the Global Far Right’s playbook, the fear of fascism itself might offer enough cautionary tale (as seen recently in Canadian elections) for Japan to stave it off.

Recall what happened recently in South Korea, where they routed a soft coup in mere weeks. Why? They’ve been through a brutal authoritarianism before.

So has Japan, albeit a few generations ago, but their fascism utterly destroyed the country. Historical amnesia is on the rise, but that basic fact has not been forgotten.

Sometimes societies have to go through an autocracy before they develop antibodies to it. It’s entirely possible that Trump is as much a vaccine as he is a plague.

But to return to my original point: I still say that Sanseito is still half-baked cosplay fascism at the moment. Belay the sensational headlines and see how this plays out. At this stage, only time will tell what side will learn well enough to seize or preserve power.

ENDS

Some Q&A with a reporter about Japan’s xenophobia, before the July elections. Do my claims still hold water?

Posted on August 13, 2025 by Debito Arudou, Ph.D.

mytest

Hi Blog. More than a month ago a reporter asked me some questions about the state of Japan in the run-up to the July 20 Elections. With permission, I gave some pretty thorough answers. They didn’t end up getting used, so I’ll publish them here. Again, they reflect what I saw before the July 20 Japan Elections, which saw well-publicized gains for the probably fascist but definitely xenophobic Sanseito Party,

Since my next SNA column will probably develop the thoughts of my answer to Question 4 below, I’m open to your feedback. Thanks. Debito Arudou, PhD.

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1) How significant role does Japanese media play in shaping anti-foreign views?

DEBITO: Japanese media plays a crucial role. Every day there’s a steady drumbeat in the media of a monolithic narrative of “We Japanese think/say/do this.” Then it’s contrasted with how foreigners must be different because, by definition, they’re not Japanese. Then we get to the steady blaming of foreigners for just about everything wrong because a) they’re more visible and easy to single out, and b) they’re different by definition, therefore they’re disturbing things for everyone else. Sensationalism sells in all free media environments, and sensationalizing alleged foreigner wrongdoings is easy money.

2) Does the educational system play a role in encouraging the “othering” of non-Japanese, or is it now more actively embracing the idea that immigration will now be a normal part of Japanese life in the future?

DEBITO: Japanese education is waking up to diversity in Japan very slowly. We still have the “hair police” in Japanese schools forcing children to dye and straighten their naturally lighter or wavy hair to enforce conformity. We still have schools showing trepidation at allowing in “foreign” students, claiming language barrier or alleged “classroom disruptions,” as if non-native youth will never absorb Japanese over time. And we still have no official immigration policy to offer infrastructure or support to children of international roots in Japan. It’s getting better over time, but not soon enough for all the children being bullied to the point of dropping out of school and becoming an uneducated underclass, as we’ve seen in the South American communities in Japan.

3) Do you see the situation on anti-foreigner sentiment improving, getting worse or staying the same in the years to come?

DEBITO: It could go either way. Politicians have been capitalizing on latent xenophobia for decades now and gotten elected on scaring the public about foreign boogeymen. More slogans behind policymaking overtly target foreign residents. On the other hand, the tourism has made more people profit from catering to Non-Japanese and put more effort and infrastructure into making systems easier to understand. That said, Japan is learning how to be a better host. Not learning how to make tourists and migrants become immigrants and fellow Japanese. Without an actual immigration policy, that’s not going to happen soon or smoothly.

4) Do you think that anti-immigration sentiment is a bigger problem in Japan than it is in other countries, and do you think that we are witnessing the early stages of significant populist, anti-foreigner movements in Japan?

DEBITO: My current field of study is the erosion of democracies worldwide. If we’re comparing Japan to other countries, the alarmism in Japan seems a bit more muted. Japanese democracy might seem a bit more robust because, even after a good three decades of racist demagogues, the all-powerful bureaucracy in Japan is still steadfast against the populist erosion of state power. And people tend to trust government as a problem solver more in Japan than other societies.

Do I see a Japan-styled Trump taking power? I have seen plenty of wannabes in Japan’s online trolls and fringe political parties, and with this election on July 20, populist xenophobia in stump speeches is more overt than ever. But all of those slogans have been said before in previous elections–and even by elected representatives in the ruling party afterwards.

What’s different now is that there are more parties making xenophobia their main party plank, offering voters a feeling of outside choice. For some, it’s better than voting the same old parties who will as usual forget their slogans once elected. But so far I see more media focus on old slogans as if they’re something new. This time the media has a clearer peg to hang a story on with the rise of fascism within Japan’s closest geopolitical ally.

But the fact still remains that in Japan, plenty have tried the Trumpist playbook, but none have succeeded compared to other democracies. None have coalesced into a coherent and unified social movement with clear plans to dismantle institutions, as compared to Hungary, Poland, Turkey, Britain, France, Italy, The Netherlands, or the United States.

If that changes, I don’t think it’ll be triggered by foreign migration or tourism. It’ll be due to an external threat like a saber-rattling North Korea or an expansionist China, as it always has in Postwar Japan.

But July 20 will be a litmus test of this theory. Until then, that’s the best assessment I can offer. ENDS

My Shingetsu News Agency Visible Minorities column 67: “Int’l tourism has been good for Japan” (June 19, 2025), where I argue that short-sighted criticisms about Japan being “overtouristed” may spoil things, so don’t let the debate backfire into racialized policymaking

Posted on June 20, 2025August 4, 2025 by Debito Arudou, Ph.D.

mytest

Hi Blog. I just got back from a tour in Japan and saw a lot of tourists. “Overtourism is becoming a hot topic. But it threatens to metaphorically “kill the golden goose”. I offer my perspective in my latest SNA column on how even local NJ Residents are falling into the fallacy that tourism is “spoiling” Japan, because countermeasures are threatening to encourage racial profiling against them. Read on. Debito Arudou, Ph.D.

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INTERNATIONAL TOURISM HAS BEEN GOOD FOR JAPAN

Short-sighted criticisms about Japan being “overtouristed” may spoil things. Don’t let the debate backfire into racialized policymaking.

SNA VM 67, June 19, 2025, By Debito Arudou

Courtesy https://shingetsunewsagency.com/2025/06/19/visible-minorities-international-tourism-has-been-good-for-japan/
Last month’s column was late because I just got back from four weeks in Japan. A luxury of academia is that in between semesters I can do long trips. As retirement looms, I’m finding ways to make life not only about work and column writing.

Interestingly, Japan is becoming part of that work-life balance. Like so many other Japan long-termers (such as Donald Keene and Alex Kerr), I’m finding myself living in Japan about twice a year. I like both Japan and US better when I can take a break from each, enjoying the best of both worlds.

The interesting thing I discovered this trip, as the US goes through another periodic isolationist phase, is that Japan in contrast seems to be becoming more accommodating. International tourism is making Japan into a more open society and an easier place to live.

JAPAN IS OLD AND BORING. EXCEPT FOR THE BOOMING TOURIST ECONOMY

When I first arrived in the 1980s, Japan was this forbidding, impenetrable, and “inscrutable” society hidebound to illogical systems. A place with a pervasive “culture of no,” where any new idea was shot down as “lacking precedent.” It certainly spent a lot of energy stymieing young, optimistic, reform-minded young people like me at the time.

But I’m aged 60 now, and finding Japan a lot more cooperative and friendly. Even sensible.

Granted, it helps that I’m fluent in the language, and Japan is inherently geared to serving old people who crave routine and predictability. It prides itself on public transport running on time, social welfare systems being reliable, and government policy being predictable and boring.

I really get that now. Given the decade of constant and wasteful spectacle generated by the Trump Era, not to mention a non-zero chance of outright civil warn in the US, I’m actually craving a boring government.

But one thing is certainly not boring about Japan: the tourist economy.

This, of course, is the product of decades of government programs. “Cool Japan,” “Yokoso Japan,” and “Omotenashi” have had their intended effect. Japan is becoming a major world tourist hub.

This trip I saw a lot of it. In addition to my regular flaneuring around Tokyo, I nipped out to Nagano, Osaka, Nara, Okayama, and Fukuoka. I saw firsthand how Japan is successfully coping with more diversity than ever before—while fighting its reflex to blame foreigners for everything.

JAPAN’S TOURISM IN PERSPECTIVE

The rate of growth of Japan’s tourism from overseas has indeed been startling, tripling from under 10 million to over 30 million foreign visitors in about a decade.

From that has sprung a lot of hoopla about Japan is becoming “overtouristed.” A quick Google will find much griping and sniping: overcrowding, traffic congestion, bad manners, garbage, luggage, noise, intrusive photography, etc. Some even call it an “invasion.”

That’s the blame reflex. But let’s keep things in perspective.

First, Japan is still a relative laggard compared to other countries. It doesn’t even make the top ten. According to World Population Review, the most-visited countries in terms of international tourist arrivals are predicted to be (in descending order, 2024): France, Spain, the US, China, Italy, Turkey, Mexico, Thailand, Germany, and the UK.

Japan bubbles under at #11. No doubt those rankings will change as the US self-sabotages its tourist economy, but Japan’s numbers are still less than half the totals of each of the top five. And yet they somehow manage their foreigner “invasions” with a lot less grumbling.

Second, it’s important to note that most tourism in Japan does not involve inbound foreigners. According to Statista, more than 80% of tourism in Japan over the past decade has been domestic. So when you talk about a tourist in Japan, they’re overwhelmingly likely to be a Japanese.

That said, that looks to change. For the first time in 2024, record numbers of tourists from overseas made up nearly a quarter of all tourist expenditure, and tourism in general is now a significant part of Japan’s economy. According to the World Travel and Tourism Council, successive record-breaking years of tourists now amount to an estimated 7.5% of Japan’s GDP.

This means after more than thirty years of economic stagnation, tourism is the one reliable source of growth and jobs. It’s forecast to account for one in ten jobs in the Japanese workforce by 2034.

RISING TO THE OCCASION WITH CLEAR ACCOMMODATION

Staying three weeks just outside Ginza this trip, I saw for myself the fruits of this tourism boom, and I think Japan is handling it pretty well.

Ginza’s streets and shops were crowded as usual, but this time there was enough ferment of foreign languages around me to make me feel I was back in Europe. Non-Japanese (NJ) were navigating trains, subways, and the shinkansen, and I saw no apparent source of concern. The NJ staff in the name-brand shops and convenience store counters were normal to the point of mundane.

Local businesses and facilities seem to be coping just fine. Along all the major train arteries were multilingual maps and ticketing machines. Food menus, especially at the chain restaurants, were on iPads or via tabletop QR codes in at least four languages. No actual spoken interaction between customer and staff was required for people to get service.

That’s quite a change. Not so long ago, there were frequent cases of establishments with “Japanese Only” signs and rules. Their most common excuse for refusing NJ entry was the presumption of a language barrier. “We don’t speak foreign languages, so we can’t give foreigners good service.” So naturally they gave them no service at all.

Of course, exclusionism still happens (and people still send me “Japanese Only” signs occasionally). But from what I saw, businesses have found a workaround. As they will. The lure of the foreign tourist yen has been irresistible, and it’s knocking down barriers.

Now tourism looks likely to expand beyond the beaten paths. I saw phalanxes of foreign tourists in places as far-flung as Tsuruga. In the backstreets of Ginza, I saw lines around the block for boutique sandwiches and other fad foods that tourists told me they found on Instagram and YouTube. People aren’t just following the tour guide flags. They’re finding their own adventures. Which means the rising tide of tourist funds will incentivize businesses nationwide to lose their exclusionary rules.

BLOWBACK FROM THE LOCALS

Of course not everyone is happy, and one surprising voice of dissent I found were long-term NJ Residents I talked to.

They felt foreign tourists were spoiling things. Echoing the standard complaints that people worldwide always make about tourists (including Japanese tourists abroad a generation ago), they find fewer and fewer “unspoiled” places where they can escape crowds,

That’s why they too support some means to tamp down on foreign tourists. Such as dual pricing. Entry restrictions. Higher entry and exit taxes to deter the onrush.

I asked why they supported charging foreigners extra.

“Because they are causing extra problems. Places have to provide menus and services in other languages. That costs money. Foreigners should foot that bill.”

Me: “So I guess that means you’d be in support of a tax on handicapped people, because one has to provide extra ‘barrier-free’ services to them, yes?” Well, uh, no.

Me again: “And how would you enforce a dual pricing policy? Don’t you think that foreign residents of Japan—like you—and Japanese-citizen Visible Minorities would also wind up being charged extra just because they didn’t look ‘Japanese’ enough?”

They responded with the fact they faced dual pricing structures in other countries. To which I said, “Yes, but you were incoming tourists there. You might think differently if you were a resident of that country and charged more just for looking foreign.”

Some cited Hawaii’s “Kama‘aina” discount for Hawaiian residents as extra pricing for foreigners. To which I said, “But when I was a resident there, I too got the “Kama’aina” discount once I got my Hawaii driver license. So it wasn’t racialized enforcement. It was a matter of residency. It’s not the same system.”

Their grumble would then return to how the tentacles of foreign tourism were killing off their special Japan. Whereupon I noted that, again, most tourism in Japan is still overwhelmingly domestic, done by residents of Japan, including crowds and pollution. We basically hear about foreign culprits because they’re more easily targeted by media. Their retort was basically yeah but still.

That was generally how our conversations went. I politely left unspoken their sense of entitlement—how only they should retain the privilege of visiting a depopulated temple, shrine, or natural area. But if others might wish to have the same experience, that would spoil it. Lucky my friends got there first so they could close the door behind them.

HALF-BAKED ARGUMENTS AND PUBLIC POLICY

Unfortunately, the Japanese Government is falling into similar logical fallacies. Local governments are already instituting higher fees starting in July at some places (such as Hokkaido’s Niseko ski resort), where the policy rubric is “foreign tourist” vs “Japanese residents.” Again, where do foreign residents fall?

As the Japan Times noted on June 5, the ruling Liberal Democratic Party is considering hiking the departure tax (currently levied on Japanese and foreign departer equally) only for foreigners. And it still lumps foreign tourist and NJ Resident together as a single unit. Worse, as usual, lawmakers are explicitly only considering the concerns of “the people (Japanese citizens)” in their policy rhetoric.

Even columnist Gearoid Ready (who generally goes out of his way to defend Japan government policies) in 2024 wrote a Japan times article entitled, “Japan really should charge tourists four times more” and make it a nationwide policy. But then he didn’t include himself as a resident of Japan, and didn’t discuss how this policy would personally affect him.

Again, this isn’t being well thought through. And it’s especially ironic that some of the strongest voices are from by reactionary NJ Residents who are potentially penalizing themselves.

Some of this understandable. With any social change there is going to be fallout and blowback. The point is to make sure that all parties have a voice at the table when crafting public policy to resolve problems. This should include locals, Japanese tourists, foreign tourists, and foreign residents. There should be conscious distinctions between each as interest groups.

It’s also important to remember why we are in this situation. The government and by-and-large the locals wanted this. And they got it. Now live with it and tweak it. Don’t make a xenophobic meal out of it.

The bottom line is that the tourism boom has been a net positive. It’s stimulating the economy, enriching both guest and host, made people more flexible about dealing with diversity, and made Japan more accessible and less inscrutable.

Most importantly, from my point of view, it’s torn down more “Japanese Only” signs than I ever could have.

The potential is there for this all to go sour. But this is what happens when you see foreigners as an economic entity but not a domestic political force. Time for that to stop.

And it’s especially time for NJ Residents not to shoot themselves in the foot by agreeing with discrimination against tourists. Because in many policymakers’ view, all foreigners are tourists. Change course. Because with the direction things are going, they won’t be part of the “Kama’aina” unless they push for it.

ENDS

My SNA Visible Minorities column 65: “Letter from Canada”, where a country weirdly threatened by its southern neighbor, including racist/secessionist merchandise from FBI Director Kash Patel, is somehow taking it all in stride (April 1, 2025, and it’s not an April Fools’ article)

Posted on March 31, 2025April 2, 2025 by Debito Arudou, Ph.D.

mytest

Hi Blog. What follows is my latest column, written while I was in Canada witnessing how Trump’s threat of tariffs is affecting Canadian society. Short answer: Not well. But better than I would have expected. Canadians so far seem to be able to separate the US government’s wicked behavior from the treatment of people with American origins. That’s sapient, and hopefully not temporary. I’m not sure the Americans would be as careful if the roles were reversed. A report from the field, with lots of links to sources, and a particular scoop about how current FBI Director Kash Patel owns a company selling racist/secessionist merchandise to Canadians. Screen captures below. It’s a weird era indeed. Debito Arudou, Ph.D.

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*T-shirt with an American Flag in the shape of the Canadian Province of Alberta, being sold by a company owned by US FBI Director Kash Patel; courtesy of SNA.*

LETTER FROM CANADA

Subtitle: A country weirdly threatened by its southern neighbor, including racist/secessionist merchandise from Kash Patel, is somehow taking it all in stride

By Arudou Debito. Shingetsu News Agency, Visible Minorities Column 65, April 1, 2025, courtesy https://shingetsunewsagency.com/2025/04/01/visible-minorities-letter-from-canada/

I am currently writing you from Canada, up here taking care of some business.

In the past I’ve lived in Canada for about a year, and now am spending a week enjoying Alberta. One of Canada’s richest provinces due to its oil and natural gas reserves, it’s actually on the front lines in the weird American MAGA push to invade Canada.

ALBERTA IS A SPECIAL PLACE FOR CONSERVATIVES

I’m told that Alberta considers itself the “Texas of Canada.” You quickly see why. People here wear cowboy boots and hats, proudly chow down on Alberta beef with Taber corn, have an annual “Stampede” festival due to its cattle ranching history, and openly eschew the politics of its “pot-head” neighbors to the west (British Columbia) and the “boring” prairie provinces to the east (Saskatchewan and Manitoba).

But Albertans reserve their biggest grievances for Ontario and Quebec, arguing that jealous national politicians “down east” drain them of tax monies and natural resource revenues while ignoring their interests. (Or, horrors, force them to learn French!)

Albertans generally vote for whatever party seems to come closest to a conservativism redolent of the US GOP. Distaste for the ruling center-left Liberal Party and former Prime Minister Trudeau (nicknamed “Turd-o” here) is normal and vocal, especially amongst the gun-toting Ford F-150 pickup-driving rural population.

Alberta has a long history of resisting what it sees as the excessive power of Eastern Canada, dating back to the populist Social Credit Party of the 1930s. Alberta’s current Premier Danielle Smith (the equivalent of a US state governor) has continued that tradition by making it clear that she and Alberta “don’t take marching orders from Ottawa,” the nation’s capital and center of federal government.

Smith argues that national policies have done nothing but harm Alberta’s oil and gas sector. The major population centers of Edmonton and Calgary cycle between boom-and-bust economies depending on constraints put on the fossil fuel market. Wind, solar, and hydroelectric be damned: To them, on-again off-again export fuel pipelines and provincial control over resource revenues make or break this part of Canada.

In addition to passing the Alberta Sovereignty Act in 2022 (to opt out of enforcing “federal rules deemed harmful to Alberta’s interests”), Smith also has a history of promoting MAGA-esque culture war issues, such as opposition to Covid mask mandates. In January, Smith even made the pilgrimage to Mar-A-Lago to meet Donald Trump and kiss the proverbial ring.

The debate shifted significantly in February and March, as Trump insultingly began calling Trudeau “governor” instead of prime minister, unilaterally declared he didn’t recognize the Canada-US border treaty of 1908, and threatened tariffs unless Canada became America’s 51^st state. Media reports of Canadians caught up in ICE immigration dragnets have caused shockwaves. The MAGA crowd even put out a map annexing southern-tier Ontario between Windsor and Kingston, which includes Toronto and comprises a good third of Canada’s economy and population.

While signaling her opposition to the tariffs, Smith still took pains to note the need to “coordinate the securing of our border against illegal migrants and drugs moving in both directions” (despite the negligible numbers in both cases)—sops to Trump talking points. Smith also had to debase herself last week in a sit-down with far-right provocateur Ben Shapiro, who called Canada “a silly country that makes maple syrup, hockey and annoying prime ministers.”

ALBERTA HAS A SOFT SPOT FOR “US-EH”

According to the CBC, support for Canada becoming part of the US is highest in Alberta, at 15 percent surveyed, as opposed to nine percent nationwide.

That’s why MAGAts target Alberta for annexation. They’ve worked with Canadian separatists for quite some time, with regular networking and megaphoning on social media. But they’ve also been involved in secession rehearsals.

In 2022, a monthlong Canadian “Freedom Convoy” of truckers protesting Covid mandates set up blockades across Canada and obnoxiously occupied the center of Ottawa. The Convoy turned out to be more than half funded by American donors. The Canadian government also seized an arsenal near the an Alberta-Montana border crossing that was set up by an Albertan militia “supportive of a war with police.”

But now it’s gone beyond funding into actively fomenting.

Shortly after I arrived in Canada, I found in my Twitter feed advertisements for an online store called “Based Apparel” (in Canada, https://thebasedco.com) offering T-shirts and other xenophobic merch.

This includes an American flag in the shape of Alberta entitled “Alberta, USA.” MCGA/MAGA caps with the Canadian maple leaf overlaid with the American flag. A US flag with a maple leaf in the blue field next to a slogan of “US-EH” (a pun on “USA” with the stereotypical Canadian “eh” sentence ending). Coffee cups saying “Singh Horton’s” instead of “Tim Horton’s,” implying they’re no longer a Canadian institution because Sikhs run franchises. (Click on the images for a closer look.)

Or if that’s not racist enough, you can get shirts with parody Community Chest “Go Directly to Jail” Monopoly game cards showing a cop dragging a Sikh saying, “Do not pass go, do not collect pension.” A meme from the “Oregon Trail” video game shows a covered wagon with the caption, “You have died of diversity” (as opposed to “dysentery”). Or you can just settle for a less subtle T-shirt depicting an American eagle f***ing a Canada goose.

Who owns Based Apparel? Kash Patel, the current Director of the FBI and a full-bore Trump sycophant. In 2022 he released a children’s book portraying Trump as a king winning an election against an evil queen (named Hillary) who accuses him of cheating. (Naturally, a wizard named “Kash” saves the day.)

Silliness aside, this merch matters. An official at the highest levels of American government, in charge of federal police investigations, is directly profiting from sowing secession in another country.

THE VIEW FROM THE GROUND

Fortunately, most Canadians, even in Alberta, don’t seem to be falling for the fringe.

A quick trip to any shopping center gives you your first clue. Choosing between imported and locally produced products has never clearer. Stores and supermarkets are very carefully putting maple leafs next to Canadian goods. Banners are up outside businesses proclaiming, “Proudly Canadian owned and operated.”

Much media has focused on Canadian liquor stores summarily removing American bourbon, whisky, and brandy from their shelves. This is a coordinated effort, since Canada’s retail liquor market is generally run by provincial governments. Alberta happens to be the only province with a fully privatized liquor market, but a representative of Real Canadian Superstore, which accounts for nearly a third of Canada’s grocery retail market share, proudly told me they removed all American booze from their shelves at the first sign of Trump tariffs and put it in storage.

Private liquor stores I visited still had a clear “America” section labeled as usual, but when asked about it, the owner said, “It’s my stock, my choice. Where would I put it? So I put it out. But once it sells out, I’m not ordering more.” The Alberta Government supports this, instructing its Gaming, Liquor, and Cannabis agency to “ban” all US alcohol imports and let the remaining retail stock sell out.

In terms of popular conservative sentiment, my Alberta businessman friend (a staunch libertarian and Liz Cheney fan) is adamant that Canadian MAGA fans are nowhere near power. “They’re out there. I see them on my Facebook but they get shouted down. I think it’s a safe bet the vast majority of Canadian conservatives do not support Trump.”

In fact, he laments how Trump’s threats have in fact backfired, draining support from the Conservative Party and delivering it to the Liberals.

In early January the Liberals were polling behind the Conservatives by double digits, and 338Canada projected a landslide victory for the latter. Mere weeks later, the Liberals are back in the lead, projected to take every province and territory except Alberta and Saskatchewan.

This doesn’t usually happen in Canadian politics. The pattern is usually that Canadian voters award power to a party but soon get sick of them. Poll numbers inexorably go down. Then another party gets in until voters get sick of them too.

But thanks to Trump’s bullying (and the fact that the Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre is basically echoing Trump’s invective of “woke obsessions” and “broken immigration”), Trudeau’s successor, Mark Carney, looks likely to cruise to victory in the next national election on April 28.

The point is, Trump’s bullying has united Canadians—even Quebec separatists—like never before. “Elbows up!” (a hockey term for standing your ground) has become the national buzzword as Canucks react viscerally to the Trump regime’s obnoxious threats to their freedom and way of life. The national mood is one of anger, and profound sadness that the US seems to have completely lost the plot.

“FORTRESS AMERICA” IS A RECURRING BAD IDEA

Last column I talked about the American propensity to take things to logical extremes. This is more evidence of that.

The US has a habit of periodically whipping itself into a frenzy over metaphorical foreign invasions (even though it hasn’t experienced an actual invasion for nearly two centuries). When that happens, public policies reflect bunker mentalities and the border becomes a fortress wall. This is worse than unseemly; it puts enormous stress on the borderless global economy and the postwar Pax Americana World Order.

The weird thing is that America’s trade war with its northern and southern neighbors, which account for about a third of US trade, pretty much came out of nowhere. In the case of Canada, it’s just plain absurd. Canada and the US have had surprisingly porous borders and hand-in-glove relations for generations. Despite what Trump may claim, no country has been as supportive of both American trade terms and war efforts (participating in basically every postwar American overseas military campaign) as Canada has.

Even in calmer times, “Fortress America” is often the first thing one experiences when approaching the border. I personally have faced harassing American Customs officials waxing racist about the fact I’m a white guy with a Japanese passport (something I’ve never, incidentally, experienced at the Japanese border), and then they would send me to secondary for a few hours until I missed my connecting flight. (My worst experience was at Calgary Airport, where you actually face American police on Canadian soil before you board your plane.)

This attitude doesn’t seem to have rubbed off on Canada. Even in Alberta, the place I would expect it most, I have not experienced any animosity towards people from America, even from the random shopkeepers and clerks I’ve struck up conversations with.

Maybe I’ve been lucky so far, but everyone I’ve talked to basically just laments how the US government is destroying one of the most constructive and productive international relationships in history.

Yes, Canadians will now buy anything but American if they can and take their vacations anywhere but the United States. Travel to the US from Canada has already plummeted by 70 percent so far this year. But so far, Canadians seem to be distinguishing the country (or at least the person on top) from the American people in general.

That’s pretty enlightened. I’m not sure many Americans, with their steady diet of chauvinistic propaganda in the right-wing media ecosystem justifying anything Trump does, would be as discrete.

DUMB IS AS DUMB DOES

The Wall Street Journal has called this “the dumbest trade war in history.” I will echo that and call it the dumbest territorial dispute in history. Last Friday, PM Carney announced that, “The old relationship we had with the United States, based on deepening integration of our economies and tight security and military cooperation, is over,” adding that Canada will have to “dramatically reduce” its reliance on the US.

So much quantifiable opportunity and trust between two prosperous societies has been squandered, for no good reason beyond the venality of one man. As the world seemingly divides into China-Russia-US spheres of influence, this wanton destruction of sovereign goodwill only weakens the North American sphere.

Meanwhile, let’s see if I have another bad experience crossing the US border this time. If I haven’t been renditioned to an ICE facility in Louisiana, you’ll hear again from me next month.

ENDS

My SNA Visible Minorities 61: “An Obituary for Former Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori”: As Trump is set to take the US Presidency again, let us consider the damage wrought by mixing political machines with family ties (Nov 2, 2024)

Posted on November 6, 2024February 28, 2025 by Debito Arudou, Ph.D.

mytest

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ALBERTO FUJIMORI, FORMER PRESIDENT OF PERU, DIES

Subtitle: On the eve of a crucial election for the future of democracy in the United States, let’s bid good riddance to another authoritarian, and consider the damage wrought by mixing political machines with family ties.

By Debito Arudou, Shingetsu News Agency, Visible Minorities column 61. November 2, 2024. Courtesy https://shingetsunewsagency.com/2024/11/02/visible-minorities-an-obituary-for-former-peruvian-president-alberto-fujimori/

Raise your glass. Another authoritarian is worm food.

I’m trying not to make a habit of writing obituaries, but people who affected policymaking in Japan just keep dying. I’ve done ruminations on the deaths of Shinzo Abe, Shintaro Ishihara, Henry Scott-Stokes, and even on positive influences such as Ivan Hall and Chalmers Johnson. Now it’s Alberto Fujimori’s turn.

Alberto Fujimori, who died last September aged 86, was the President of Peru from 1990 to 2000. He was the first person of Japanese ancestry to assume that office, part of the wave of Japanese immigration to North and South America more than a century ago, assimilating into Peruvian society fully enough to be elected their national leader.

This sounds like a paragon of tolerance and openness to outsiders, but what Fujimori did with that power became a cautionary tale—of how an outsider, once let in, can corrupt everything.

FROM IMMIGRANT BEGINNINGS TO AN OUTSIDER-INSIDER

Allegedly born in Peru (although even that would be later disputed), Fujimori rose from being a well-credentialed agronomist and mathematics lecturer to a university rector at a national university.

Like many people I’ve met with physical science backgrounds, Fujimori had unsophisticated views about the social sciences. A person who preferred solo policymaking behind a laptop rather than the tedious work of meeting and persuading fellow politicians, he found democracy annoying. People were either problems to be solved or obstacles to be removed.

Once he got a taste of power in the rectory (we academics know something about what happens to people pampered in hierarchical university administrations), he learned how to bulldoze through anything that got in his way, including the rule of law.

Running as a long-shot outsider, when Fujjmori found no established party would nominate him, he founded his own party, hiring staffers supported by the CIA. Although he campaigned on anti-corruption and anti-terrorism slogans, Fujimori also pandered to populism, visiting dozens of remote villages in his “Fuijimobile” (a cart pulled by a tractor) cosplaying in Andean garb and advertising himself as “a president like you.” Adopting the moniker of el chino (“the Chinaman”), he played to Peru’s racial politics as a common, hardworking Asian out to stick it to the white ruling elite.

Ultimately, he won an upset victory over the establishment candidate, acclaimed novelist Mario Vargas Llosa. As is the pattern of demagogues worldwide (obvious examples should come to mind), he got elected not despite, but because he had no experience in national politics, offering a clean break from the past.

Although Peru’s ruling class believed they could co-opt him, they soon found themselves shut out of power. Fujimori largely abandoned his economic proposals for Plan Verde, the American “Project 2025” of its time, designed by the Peruvian military to root out the enemy within. Exploiting the executive-branch loopholes within Peru’s Constitution to rule by decree, within three years he declared Peru’s democracy “a domestic formality—a facade” and instituted a “Fuji-coup,” dissolving congress and the judiciary and creating his own constitution.

Emboldened by a surge of popularity despite the coup, Fujimori became even more authoritarian. His crackdowns on domestic terrorists and leftist opponents targeted tens of thousands of people, including students, journalists, and businesspeople kidnapped and executed by the military. He also embarked on humanitarian disasters such as the forced sterilization of indigenous women, ostensibly because they were suspected of breeding guerrillas, but also were “culturally backward” according to eugenics theory (a favorite of the Mensa crowd blind to the political outcomes of doctrinaire pseudoscience).

For the remainder of Fujimori’s decade in power, corruption freely flowed. By the end of his first term in 1995, Fujimori circumvented Peru’s one-consecutive-term limit to the presidency by getting congress to pass a law saying his first five years in power didn’t count because he wasn’t elected under his own constitution.

Despite all his anti-corruption promises, the rule of law meant nothing unless it furthered his goals. Fujimori would eventually be convicted of human rights abuses and corruption, as would 1500 people in his government.

JAPAN SUPPORTS IT OWN, NO MATTER WHAT

Here’s where Japan comes in: Worldwide observers, human-rights NGOs, and governments were denouncing Fujimori’s antics in real time, yet Japan saw little unsavory. Instead, it celebrated him openly as the hometown boy who made good.

He was the particular darling of Japan’s far-right, feted every time he came to Tokyo by the likes of bigoted Tokyo Governor Shintaro Ishihara, as proof that Wajin-blooded people were eugenically superior enough to get elected by foreigners. Fujimori thus leveraged the soft spot of Japan’s insecure fascists—their insatiable craving for international affirmation and recognition as some kind of superlative. Japan enabled his corruption by increasing investments and business opportunities.

This saprophytic relationship was obvious even to Peru’s insurgents. That’s why in 1996 they raided the Japanese ambassador’s residence during a birthday party for Japan’s Emperor and took hostages. After a four-month standoff (covered assiduously by Japan’s media—reporters even snuck inside the compound, which is why Fujimori couldn’t act on his impulse to just rush in and shoot everything up), security forces did finally storm the structure and summarily execute all insurgents on the spot (so brutally that the Inter-American Court of Human Rights ruled it a violation of international law in 2015).

It didn’t matter to Japan. Fujimori continued to cultivate their relationship in case things went sour. By the end of his second term in 2000, things did.

FUJIMORI FLEES INTO JAPAN’S EMBRACE

As Fujimori tried to stand for a third term that was unconstitutional even under his own constitution, his consigliere and CIA agent Vladimir Montesinos got arrested in Panama after video surfaced of him brazenly bribing politicians. So Fujimori fled to Japan after an international summit, famously faxing his resignation from a Tokyo hotel room.

He soon found new digs. Governor Ishihara and far-right novelist Ayako Sono (who famously proposed South-African style apartheid for foreigners in Japan in 2015) put him up as a guest on their properties, and made him the toast of Japan’s ruling elite for years. All this while Interpol put him on their most-wanted list, and Peru demanded Japan extradite him for domestic trial.

Now on the lam, it looked like the law might finally catch up with Fujimori. But here’s the funny thing about demagogues: Outsiders not beholden to the standing power structure get used to bending reality around them—to the point where they figure out how do it in other societies.

Consider Japan’s process to become a Japanese citizen. It’s arduous, of course, and laws explicitly state that dual citizenship is not allowed, moreover people with criminal records or have “voluntarily taken public office in a foreign country” are not allowed to naturalize. Moreover, the process might take years after a series of screenings and difficult paperwork. I know because I’ve done it.

Yet Fujimori was issued a passport mere weeks after defecting. So that kinda laid bare for the rest of us earnest immigrants that Japan won’t follow its own laws if blood and celebrity are involved.

That’s how Japan ignored Peru’s extradition demands because — hey, presto! — Fujimori is a Japanese citizen. True to form of “protecting their own,” like it has done for many Japanese criminals committing crimes overseas (e.g., international child abduction, or even, in the case of Issei Sagawa, cannibalism), Japan granted Fujimori safe haven.

YOU CAN’T KEEP A BAD MAN DOWN

Fujimori could have lived his years in increasing obscurity, but he got bored. So he renewed his Peruvian passport in Tokyo, flew to Chile in 2005, and declared his candidacy for the upcoming Peruvian presidential election in absentia. The fool was promptly placed under house arrest. From Chile, in 2007 he ran for an Upper House seat in Japan in absentia, and lost. He was extradited to Peru shortly afterwards, and in 2009 was convicted in four criminal trials and sentenced to decades in prison.

But the story doesn’t end there.

In came the family. Fujimori’s daughter to Keiko ran for the presidency in 2011, 2016, and 2021 to spring her dad from jail; fortunately she lost each time. So Fujimori’s son Kenji (who also got elected to office) got a pardon from the current president in 2017 after a backroom deal. But in 2018 that pardon was overturned by Peru’s Supreme Court, so back in the clink he went. After a series of flip-flops by future courts, Alberto Fujimori was finally released from jail on humanitarian grounds at the end of 2023, less than a year before he died of cancer.

But the story still doesn’t end there.

LESSONS OF THE FUJIMORI CASE

Pundit Dave Spector once told me that Alberto Fujimori is an accident of birthplace. “If he were born in Canada, he’d be a dentist, not a dictator.”

I don’t disagree, but one more dynamic worth exploring here is what happens when political machines get intertwined with family ties. They embed corruption and make it generational.

Elections in democracies are often a family affair. In fact, they’d better be on board. Photos of the spouse and kids often appear in campaigns to ground someone as “a family man.” The “First Lady” has a storied role. Relatives emerge to capitalize (“Billy Beer,” anyone?), In fact, “I’m doing it for my family” is usually seen as a positive motivation.

But families have weird power outcomes, and we reflexively tend to excuse them as part of the “whole fam damily” thing. But in public positions, this a recipe for people getting jobs and tasks not based upon merit. “Nepo babies” are a thing. You gave that job to your gormless kid because blood is thicker than water, and that’s somehow relatable.

So when governmental leadership structures centralize around families, horrible things happen. The most glaring example is the Kim family in North Korea, who have lived as kings for the better part a century, but plenty of autocracies make sure the right blood remains in power. That’s precisely what kingdoms are, after all.

Yet democracies are demonstrably not immune. For example, generational families make up the lion’s share of Diet members in Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party. In the Philippines, even after decades of kleptocracy and repression under Ferdinand Marcos, his son Bongbong still got elected president in 2022. Even wife “shoe closet” Imelda — who is still alive!— won multiple elections to the House of Representatives despite all her convictions for corruption.

For its part, the US has had multiple president Adamses, Harrisons, Roosevelts, and Bushes. Canada has their Trudeaus, India their Gandhis. Similar generational leadership can be found in France, Indonesia, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan, You get the idea. Once they get power, they “keep it in the family.”

That’s why when rich Japan similarly saw Fujimori as “part of the family,” it opened a sluice gate of money that finessed largesse and forgave excess.

Thus Japan bears a fundamental responsibility in keeping Fujimori in clover and out of jail.

Even after Alberto’s death, Peru remains saddled with the Fujimoris stinking up the place. Alberto’s daughter Keiko, son Kenji, and ex-wife Susana have all had stints in Peru’s legislature. No doubt Keiko is going to make a few more runs at the presidency, since her father’s political machine, according to Transparency International, has embezzled approximately $600 million. In 2004, TI listed Alberto as the ninth most corrupt leader in the world, joining the good company of leaders from the Philippines, Ukraine, Zaire, Nigeria, Malaysia, Serbia, and Haiti—all countries whose populations can ill-afford billions of government dollars being spirited away by political families.

This matters because come November, the United States seems likely to join these ranks. Revelations surface daily about how corrupt the Trump family has been during and after the Trump presidency. If he gets back in, expect even worse grift. Even if he loses, expect his eldest son to remain a kingmaker in the Republican Party.

Still, as of right now, the Trumps are pikers compared to Fujimori. For brutally subverting a democracy for the next generation or two, exploiting another democracy by leveraging their weakness for cultural superiority and racial bloodlines, siphoning off more money than the economies of entire countries, and killing, maiming, and impoverishing hundreds of thousands of people just for the sake of profit, ego, and hair-brained schemes, Alberto Fujimori deserves a special place in hell.

Accident of birth or not, Alberto Fujimori is the Governor Ishihara who actually managed to achieve his goals. And like Ishihara, that’s worth covering in one of my obits.

ENDS
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Debito’s SNA VM column 58 “Japan’s Census Shenanigans”: How Japan’s registry system and accounting of foreign residents has led to statistical inaccuracies and exclusionary politics (July 30, 2024)

Posted on July 31, 2024July 31, 2024 by Debito Arudou, Ph.D.

mytest

SNA VM 58 JAPAN’S CENSUS SHENANIGANS

Subtitle: How Japan’s registry system and accounting of foreign residents has led to statistical inaccuracies and exclusionary politics

By Debito Arudou, PhD. Shingetsu News Agency, Visible Minorities column 58, July 30, 2024

Courtesy https://shingetsunewsagency.com/2024/07/30/visible-minorities-japans-census-shenanigans/

A fundamental issue for any country is knowing who lives there, and this is generally measured by a national census every ten years.

Censuses are serious things. They should accurately reveal in granular detail who people are, where they live, and how they live, in order for public policies to effectively target social services, health and welfare. Censuses even have international standards, with the United Nations’ Statistics Division providing a template.

In 2020, the UN approved the “World Population and Housing Census Programme,” which “recognizes population and housing censuses as one of the primary sources of data needed for formulating, implementing and monitoring policies and programmes aimed at inclusive socioeconomic development and environmental sustainability.”

The UN notes that, “Disaggregated data are fundamental for the measurement of progress of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, especially in the context of assessing the situation of people by income, sex, age, race, ethnicity, migratory status, disability and geographic location, or other characteristics.”

Yet a seemingly simple act of a headcount is subject to nasty political tugs-of-war.

POWER IN NUMBERS, IF MEASURED

For example, in the late 2010s, the Trump Administration pushed hard to insert a nationality question in the US Census. The unstated reasoning behind not counting non-citizens (as exposed by the New York Times) was purely political. Republican policymakers wanted to shrink the populations of urban areas (which generally vote more Democrat) so they would get less federal funding. It would also shrink Democrat power in terms of electoral delegates, helping Republicans win elections and further gerrymander electoral districts in their favor.

In other words, the GOP wanted to stop counting immigrants as people because they wanted to counteract an inevitable demographic phenomenon—the United States getting browner.

Fortunately, the Supreme Court ultimately blocked this move, so the current policy of the US Census remains to count all people in the US, regardless of legal status, as denizens. But that’s the power of a Census—counting people is the lynchpin of political representation.

JAPAN’S STATISTICAL HOCUS-POCUS WITH COUNTING EVEN DOCUMENTED FOREIGNERS

In Japan it’s even more politicized and nasty, but that’s not news. Japan has steadfastly refused to account for its foreign population for generations.

For example, from 1947 onwards, despite their contributions to Japan’s wartime effort as soldiers and citizens of empire, Japan stripped all resident ethnic Koreans and Chinese of their Japanese citizenship and residency.

By doing so, Japan effectively ethnically cleansed the country.

It worked like this: Japan has two registry systems. One, the koseki system, confers Japanese citizenship. The other, the basic resident roster (jumin kihon daicho), determines residency.

By excluding foreigners from the latter, the local resident rosters, all foreigners were rendered as legally invisible on local household (setai) registries. Even if they were married to Japanese—foreign spouses simply weren’t listed as “family members.”

Similarly, Japan refused to issue foreigners living in Japan equivalent Residency Certificates (juminhyo), which are essential to establishing basic amenities such as bank accounts.

In other words, anyone not officially a Japanese citizen on a koseki was not an official Japanese resident (jumin) either. Japan remained the only “developed” country in the Postwar order doing this, long into the twenty first century.

After enough embarrassing oddities making the news (e.g., local governments granting honorary juminhyo to stray animals and cartoon characters), the system was amended in 2012 to allow Foreign Residents with legal residency visas to be issued juminhyo.

But to this day Japan still excludes foreigners from the jumin kihon daicho. This means they are not counted in Japan’s official population tallies.

Look closely at the government’s next annual announcement of population decline. The wording includes the caveat that they are talking about the “population of Japanese” (nihonjin no jinko), not the “population of Japan” (nihon no jinko). This despite the fact that Foreign Residents live in and pay taxes in Japan like any other Japanese? Again, you have to be a citizen to be countable.

Nasty old habits die hard.

CONTROL THE CENSUS AND MAINTAIN JAPAN’S ETHNOSTATE

So what about Japan’s broader decennial Census (kokusei chousa)? Does it better account for the status of Non-Japanese in Japan?

I turned to scholar Dr. John C. Maher, Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at International Christian University, and author of works including “Language Communities in Japan” (Oxford University Press, 2022), “Multilingualism: A Very Short Introduction” (Oxford, 2017), and “Diversity in Japanese Culture and Language” (Routledge, 2012).

To see how diversity was measured in censuses worldwide, his approach was to look at how closely they adhered to UN census protocols. Let’s start with what he found intriguing from a linguistics point of view:

“There are around 211 censuses in the world. Most never ask about what language is spoken by the household. For example, Italy, Holland, Germany, Sweden, and Greece do not. But Australia, England, Scotland, Ireland, the United States, New Zealand—in other words, the English-speaking countries—do.”

But if you’re going to include questions about languages spoken, Dr. Maher stresses, do it right. “Questions like these are tendentious. Some may actually create the wrong impression. For example in Britain, the question asked is, ‘What is your main language?’ From a linguistics standpoint, that’s poorly constructed. No answer will give you dispositive data.”

Japan doesn’t include a language question either, and in Dr. Maher’s view this is quite “normal” among the community of nations. What Japan does do surprisingly well, he notes, is acknowledge domestic multilinguality.

“Japan publishes its Census in 22 languages. Most countries, including the United States, come nowhere near that number. You can, of course, opt to get the Census in Japanese, so it’s not forced on you. But that’s a remarkable effort to communicate with your foreign population on the part of the government.”

However, there is one question Japan also conspicuously leaves out: a question on race and ethnicity.

That’s odd since Japan’s Census is otherwise pretty nosy. It asks detailed questions about socioeconomic status, income, household members, etc. As it should, for reasons argued above.

But a number of my friends (who harbor abiding concerns about what any government does with your data) consider the Japan Census overly intrusive, and treat it like the NHK guy knocking to collect TV subscriptions.

To get around that predisposition, the Japanese government stresses that answering Census questions is entirely optional.

But how about making it optional for respondents to reveal their racial or ethnic backgrounds?

The Japan Census for decades now has refused to include that question.

It does, however, ask about nationality. And that’s where I see the politics tiptoeing in.

For example, when I (as a Japanese citizen) fill out the Census, there is a question about nationality. You either choose “Japanese” or “Foreign;” and if the latter, indicate your country of citizenship.

As a naturalized citizen, I tick “Japanese,” of course. But there is no means for me to indicate that I am a Japanese with American ancestry/ethnicity/national origin, etc. If I could, I would indicate my hyphenated status. A “Japanese with American roots” (beikoku-kei nihonjin).

But I can’t. The Census remains willfully blind to that.

I asked Dr. Maher why. “A former member of the committee for the national census told me that questions about ethnicity and language are omitted because of concerns about privacy.”

Suddenly now there’s a privacy concern? Even though making things optional should obviate that?

“I don’t have a hypothesis for that. When I have one, I will ask the Japan’s Census Committee. But I imagine their answer will be something along the lines of, ‘Our privacy concerns are the same as every other country.’”

Dr. Maher concluded, “Granted, most countries don’t follow the guidance from the UN Census Committee, despite their experts from many countries on how to do a census. So I have little doubt that Japan believes it is not acting anywhere outside the international norm.”

WHY DOES THE JAPAN CENSUS OPT TO BE INACCURATE?

Dr. Maher, being the cautious academic, doesn’t have a hypothesis yet. But here I’m writing in the capacity of a newspaper columnist, and it’s my job to have an argument. So I will offer mine:

Japan doesn’t inquire about race and ethnicity because that data would uncover an inconvenient truth—that Japan is in fact more multicultural and multiethnic than official narratives would hold.

Japan has had generations of international marriages and fairly small (but unignorable) numbers of naturalized citizens.

Those people will not show up as such on the Japan Census.

This matters. Thanks to the bloodline assumptions (enshrined in Japanese law) that anyone with Japanese citizenship is of Japanese blood, many people (even some overseas academics who should know better) erroneously assume that Japan has few, if any, minorities; and even if they exist, they are invisible.

Never mind the existence of Visible Minorities that ground this very column. Never mind the evidence of “Japanese Only” signs. Never mind all the cases of police racial profiling during street shakedowns, targeting Japanese citizens who don’t “look Japanese.”

Their existence is officially overlooked by the Japan Census by having only a nationality question.

This is essentially a means to deny policy relief to Japan’s Visible Minorities, unilaterally deciding they aren’t worthy of being counted.

Without any hard data, now comes the repeated claims by the Japanese government in the United Nations that Japan doesn’t need a law against racial discrimination.

Why? Because Japan has no races.

Japan’s international representatives have officially and repeatedly stated that all Japanese citizens belong to “the Japanese race,” and any discrimination that happens is happening to “foreigners,” due to their foreign nationality. It’s “foreigner discrimination,” not “racial discrimination.”

Thus in Japan you are either a Japanese or a foreigner. The binary must hold. And the Japan Census’s nationality-only question explicitly upholds it.

Dr. Maher would not explicitly say that the Japan Census deliberately chooses to maintain the fiction that Japan is monocultural and monoethnic (tan’itsu minzoku).

So I will. That’s its goal. It opts to be inaccurate.

Because it’s completely within character. Given the long and continued history of excluding foreigners from population and residency tallies, the National Census’s undercounting Japan’s people with foreign roots is just another nasty old habit.

There are another five years before Japan’s next Census. Plenty of time to make amends and amendments.

Add the optional race and ethnicity question, include foreign residents as part of the official Japan population, and give us some official data for just how diverse Japan actually is.

ENDS

Debito’s SNA VM column 57: “Overtourism as racism” (July 1, 2024). Most media on too many foreign tourists in Japan ignores how xenophobes are using “overtourism” to bully foreigners. Debito.org even argues it’s producing discriminatory policies worse than “Japanese Only” signs!

Posted on July 2, 2024July 2, 2024 by Debito Arudou, Ph.D.

mytest

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“OVERTOURISM” AS RACISM

Much media has covered the downside of too many foreign tourists in Japan. Less attention has been devoted to how xenophobes use “overtourism” as a means to bully foreigners.

By Debito Arudou, Ph.D.

SNA Visible Minorities column 57, July 1, 2024

Courtesy https://shingetsunewsagency.com/2024/07/01/visible-minorities-overtourism-as-racism/

In late May, Joshua Sherlock, an eight-year resident of Kyoto offering local tours, took a group of foreign tourists on an evening visit of Yasaka Shrine. They were confronted by a local middle-aged woman (Twitter handle @fujino_ojo), accusing them of ringing the shrine’s bell too loudly and disrespecting a religious place.

Fujino took the liberty of filming the occasion, and according to her video, Sherlock’s group apologized multiple times. But she still chased after them as they left. Sherlock repeatedly asked her to leave them alone in English and Japanese, to which Fujino accused Sherlock of discrimination because he spoke English to her. Finally, he answered in Japanese using the same tone she used on him. Claiming Sherlock had “rudely brushed her off,” Fujino then uploaded her videos to Twitter where they got a million views.

What happened next was devastating. According to The Times (London), Sherlock’s family reported people telephoning his home to scream insults and demand he leave Japan. A removal van arrived to collect their belongings. Strangers began prowling their neighborhood, and somebody threatened to set their apartment on fire. His wife began having panic attacks and their daughter was taken out of school.

Sherlock says that he no longer feels safe in Kyoto, and, suspending his tour services, fears that even stepping outside might result in him being “attacked by a lynch mob of extreme right-wing people.”

The Times’ headline: “Japanese hospitality wears thin as overtourism takes toll”.

“OVERTOURISM” AS A MEANS OF HARASSMENT

“Overtourism” has become a trendy word to describe Japan attractions (e.g., Shibuya Scramble, Hachiko, Ginza, Kyoto, Senso-ji, Mount Fuji) being overrun by tourists. But in Japan the word is specifically associated with “foreign tourists,” i.e., mobs blocking traffic, disrupting local businesses and mores by littering and chattering away in their foreign languages.

I don’t dispute that “overtourism” can happen. Too many people crowding into a place can produce problems of noise, pollution, disruption, and property damage.

But be careful about associating it with “foreigners.” As evidenced by the Karen-esque confrontation at Yasaka Shrine, it’s giving license to Japan’s busybodies, bullies, and xenophobes.

This column will argue that “overtourism” is not only becoming the latest incarnation of racialized bullying, it’s also producing reactionary public policies that are actually worse than the “Japanese Only” signs of yore.

WHAT EXACTLY DOES JAPAN WANT FROM ITS TOURISTS?

Given Japan’s excellent public transportation systems, tourism has long been a source of economic activity. As Japanese discovered they had more disposable income, depopulating rural areas realized they needed more revenue.

So local governments launched programs to encourage people to visit. Even during the privations of the pandemic, there were subsidized traIns, cut rates on hotel and airplane packages, and ad campaigns for local festivals and seasonal sights encouraging people to get out and spend money.

This included foreign tourists. Hard to believe now, but Japan once whined that there weren’t enough foreigners sightseeing. An article in the June 6, 2010, Asahi Shinbun grumbled that Chinese consumers were being “stingy,” noting their “tendency to scrimp on accommodations and meals and bypass tourist attractions for the main purpose of their trips—buying electronic appliances and designer brand clothing and accessories.”

So the national government steered them towards those attractions with slogans about Japan’s special “omotenashi” (hospitality) and splashy “Cool Japan” and “Yokoso Japan” campaigns worldwide. For good measure, Japan also sponsored major international competitions such as the FIFA World Cup, the Rugby World Cup, and the Olympics.

The goal was to make Japan a major world tourism destination. They succeeded beyond their wildest dreams.

In 2023, according to the World Travel and Tourism Council, Japan’s tourism sector was forecast to employ about 5.6 million people and represent 6.8% of Japan’s GDP. With the devalued yen, I expect the numbers will be even better this year.

But there can be too much of a good thing. Local governments in Kyoto and Mt. Fuji have started restricting entry to certain areas. A town in Yamanashi famously put up a screen to block a view of Mt Fuji behind a convenience store, blaming this overkill on “bad manners” from foreign tourists. And as seen in the Yasaka Shrine case, there have been increased confrontations with “culturally disrespectful” tourists.

The flip side is that there are people eager to take offense and capitalize on confrontation.

“CULTURAL DIFFERENCES” USED AS A WEAPON

In 2019, this column wrote about how Halloween in Shibuya was a target of “Xeno-Scapegoating”, where drinking in public was somehow portrayed as an imported problem. Yes, despite Japan being the origin of “cosplay,” the seasonal festivals and outdoor partying, entertainment sectors in every Japanese city, and the lack of open container laws, Shibuya Mayor Ken Hasebe made that argument with a straight face when he banned all festivities in 2023.

He could because whenever foreigners are proximate to a problem, they tend to get blamed for it.

Why? Because of cultural conceits about “unique Japan.” If Japan is different from everywhere else in the world, foreigners must axiomatically have “different manners” (or they wouldn’t be foreign). So “cultural differences” are seen as an inevitable source of problems wherever foreigners congregate.

But there are people who take advantage of this dynamic: bullies. They exist in every society, but are especially powerful in Japan because of the general avoidance of confrontation. They get a freer hand to push people around because fewer people push back.

Bullies generally prey on the vulnerable, so they especially like to push foreigners around. After all, foreigners are supposed to be “guests” (not residents) while Japanese are their “hosts,” so the former occupies a lower rung on the social ladder. (If you doubt that, consider how it is official policy in Japan’s civil service to not grant administrative jobs to foreigners, expressly because they would have authority over Japanese. They must remain subordinate.)

This makes foreigners, not to mention Japan’s Visible Minorities (Japanese citizens who do not “look Japanese”), an easy target. Allow me to illustrate.

Last month I was lined up waiting for a taxi in front of Tokyo Station, and just as a cab pulled up for me, some pushy middle-aged guy jumped the line and took it. When I told him in Japanese that I was in fact next, he cursed me out, shouting that I should speak “proper Japanese” (peppered with a few “omae”s to establish dominance). So I obliged, telling him in “proper Japanese” to get bent and eat shite. Clearly not used to being challenged by the likes of me, he shut up, took my cab anyway and fumed as the door closed. I got the next cab and got on with my day.

Now, if any culture-policing Karen at Yasaka Shrine had been filming that, they would have seen people in line apologizing to me. I also looked over the crowd and saw no hairy eyeballs on me, so clearly they had seen his queue jumping too.

But the lesson I took from this incident is this: The bully chose the foreign-looking guy as the spot to jump the queue, thinking he could get away with it. And he kinda did.

Now consider what happens when these bullies think they can empower themselves as Culture Police as part of the “overtourism” backlash.

FROM ENFORCEMENT OF THE RULES TO MAKING UP YOUR OWN RULES

Live in Japan long enough and you’ll probably encounter the Culture Police. They’re essentially the people wanting foreigners to “get off their lawn.” Of course, all of Japan is their lawn and they consider themselves the arbiter of “the Japanese Way.”

They’re in parks enforcing arbitrary rules like telling you not to eat in public or talk loudly in foreign languages. Or they’re gruffly sorting through your garbage bags on Gomi Day assuming foreigners can’t follow the rules. Or drunkenly giving you a piece of their mind on the street regarding something they’ve taken an instant dislike to, such as your not walking on the correct side of the sidewalk or daring to date a Japanese.

Some of these weirdos take their policing role quite literally. There have been cases of people masquerading as uniformed cops to demand foreigners’ ID and get their private details, which is one reason why the government rendered that info invisible on Gaijin Cards.

Usually it’s best to ignore these Karens. But sometimes you can’t, especially when they swarm online.

Yasaka Shrine is an excellent case in point. It’s one thing for Fujino to point out somebody’s social faux pas, then accept their apologies in good faith. It’s a completely different matter to film them and vindictively upload it for millions to see, encouraging doxxing, destroying Sherlock’s livelihood and terrorizing his family.

But the online swarm went even further, calling their shrine visit a “desecration” (fukei), and advocating criminal prosecution under Penal Code Article 188 with 6 months imprisonment and a 100,000 yen fine. So if they didn’t drive Sherlock out of Japan, they could try to get him arrested.

All this for ringing a bell too loudly.

BULLYING CRYSTALIZING INTO BAD GOVERNMENT POLICY

But the overkill doesn’t stop there. Riding the backlash to “overtourism,” people are already creating nutty policies that target foreigners.

Restaurants are charging higher “foreigner” prices and blaming it on Japan’s cheapening yen. Local government officials are demanding an entry tax for foreign tourists at attractions. The Osaka Governor and Himeji Mayor are currently considering a significant Gaijin Surcharge to enter their local castles. Others have established “foreigner-only” buses and hotels.

It only promises to get more amateurish. For example, Remi Kimura, indicatively a “former volunteer guide who currently works in the social media content industry,” somehow got a one-off column published in the Japan Times on June 21 calling for an “arrival tax” on foreigners, to “dissuade some from coming to Japan while funding cultural preservation.”

What was she basing this on? She opens with how she went back to her hometown in the Japan Alps, finding a restaurant with “avocado toast” and “cold cuts and bread,” something she claimed “virtually no Japanese person would order.” To her this was evidence that “tourism has transformed the places of my childhood.”

I’m not sure what she’s trying to preserve beyond her own personal preferences. I found a charcuterie plate (rendered as such in katakana) at a local craft beer place in Tokyo Jinbocho. I also found avocado sushi combos in a kaiten sushi restaurant in Engaru, all the way out in the Hokkaido outback.

Photo: Avocado on the menu: Toriton restaurant, Engaru Town, untouristed Hokkaido, June 2024.

Neither place is overtouristed. So Kimura is essentially blaming foreigners for Japanese tastes evolving when she wasn’t looking. Get off my lawn!

“OVERTOURISM” COUNTERMEASURES ARE IN FACT WORSE THAN “JAPANESE ONLY” SIGNS

When I put this issue up on Debito.org last month, regular commenters had a lot to say. One even made the case that Gaijin Surcharges (dual pricing systems, or nijuu kakaku sei) are actually worse than “Japanese Only” signs and rules outright excluding all foreigners.

First, exclusions cost the company because they lose business. On the other hand, overcharging foreigners rewards the company with more money.

Second, how will the dual pricing systems be enforced? Will Foreign Residents have to produce their Gaijin Cards to prove their residency? Will these ID checks, once unlawfully required by hotels at the behest of the police, now be expanded to regular shops nationwide? Will Japan’s Visible Minorities also be forced somehow to prove their Japaneseness to get the “local” price?

Third, the pressure to change course disappears. A “Japanese Only” sign not only invites public shame, it is in fact unconstitutional with lawsuits supporting its removal. A Gaijin Surcharge is a lot more sustainable and probably harder to challenge in court, especially if the government is behind it.

So financial incentives are there to make things more expensive for foreigners only nationwide, including those working here and getting paid in Japanese yen like any other Japanese. The social hierarchies that already force “foreigners” onto a lower social rung are now fostering an economic apartheid.

CONCLUSION: YOU WANTED THEM HERE. NOW PROTECT THEM.

The utter irony behind this situation is that, again, Japan wanted tourists to save Japan’s economy. Now that they’re here doing so, they’re getting punished. Local governments are succumbing to vocal xenophobes and coming up with discriminatory policies.

Foreign Residents and Visible Minorities are also getting caught in the backlash. What’s happening to Joshua Sherlock’s family is not just Cultural Karenism. It’s outright terrorism.

Japan has for nearly three decades already refused to protect foreigners against racial discrimination despite international treaty promises. Not protecting them from the “overtourism” bullies is similar negligence.

What should be done?

First, let’s create an official definition of “overtourism” that doesn’t encourage foreigner bashing and racial profiling. Have it show some nuance that reflects the fact that plenty of tourists are Japanese citizens and Foreign Residents too.

Second, develop suitable infrastructure to accommodate incoming foreign tourists. If that means siphoning off numbers to more outlying attractions, make that possible and do the groundwork to prepare locals for any anticipated language and cultural barriers.

Third, bring in qualified tourism experts. Not the “get off my lawn” Cultural Karens with an aversion to avocado. From what I’ve witnessed, the “overtouristed” places are already doing a pretty good job. Get their advice on how to protect our “guests” as good “hosts” should.

Above all, stop blaming the tourists for doing what you asked them to do—come here and enjoy themselves. Yes, tourists can be more respectful and mannerly. But make those rules, norms, and manners clear, and enforce them gently but firmly.

And do it quickly. Japan’s cultural hypersensitivity is already a source of overseas humor. Last month The Onion ran a satirical article entitled, “Tourist Immediately Breaks 34 Sacred Local Customs While Deboarding Airplane,” where an American “within 30 seconds of unbuckling his seat belt at the gate, had unknowingly violated countless unwritten rules that inhabitants of Japan had observed for thousands of years.”

Tourists can always take their money elsewhere. After decades of effort to get them here, don’t let Japan’s Cultural Karens, bullies, and xenophobes spoil things for everyone.

ENDS

Incidents of confrontationalism toward NJ are on the rise. Debito.org argues that this is standard social bullying of foreigners being disguised as a reaction to alleged “overtourism”. Push back at it.

Posted on June 2, 2024June 26, 2024 by Debito Arudou, Ph.D.

mytest

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Hi Blog. This is just a quick personal post as what’s happening to others is also happening to me.

We’ve had plenty of reports in recent months of people being confrontational towards NJ (Resident and Tourist), or people who look like NJ, accusing them of all manner of cultural slights and faux pas.

In recent weeks, we’ve had a confrontation at Yasaka Shrine in Kyoto, and enough tourism in Kyoto and Mt Fuji to warrant bans on people going to certain places — even the recent overkill of a local government putting up a screen to block a view of Mt Fuji around a convenience store, with predictable accusations that foreigners are spoiling everything. Halloween in Shibuya even became a target, with drinking in the street made out to be a foreign-imported problem (seriously?!).

Some of this is inevitable. For quite some time now we’ve had grumbles about Chinese consumers’ spending habits in places like Ginza. And whenever foreigners are about, they tend to be the first people blamed for any problem due to “cultural differences” that are automatically at odds with Japan’s putative “uniqueness”. They’re a soft target.

It even happened to me yesterday in front of Tokyo Station. Some ojisan (now they’re actually younger than me) decided to jump his place in line for taxis in front of us, and then cursed me out when I told him that that wasn’t acceptable behavior. When I cursed him out back, he told me to speak “proper Japanese” peppered with a few “omae”s to establish his dominance. I told him to get lost and to eat shit, and he jumped into the cab and fumed as the doors closed. The people behind us in line apologized to me (thanks; appreciated, but not something you’re responsible for), and a visual survey of the crowd behind me revealed no hairy eyeballs being directed at me. They saw his line jumping too. So I got the next cab and got on with my day.

But the lesson I took from this incident is that, since bullying is a cultural standard in Japan due to the hierarchical nature of everything here, there are plenty of bullies who naturally believe that anyone who looks NJ is on lower social rung. Seeing me as a soft target, the bully yesterday decided to enforce that.

And while he didn’t accuse me specifically of being a tourist, it’s easy nowadays to justify the standard bullying that happens to NJ as a reaction to overtourism.

We as Visible Minorities and NJ Residents should be wary of that dynamic and push back at it. Don’t let overtourism become leverage for bullying. Make it clear that rules are rules, rudeness is rudeness, and Cool Japan is no longer cool when it becomes knee-jerk disrespectful.

After all, tourism is what Japan wanted. “Cool Japan” and all that. And now you’ve got record levels of visitors (not to mention NJ Residents, by the way). So live with it. Deal with it (as I’ve found Japan generally has, successfully).

But definitely don’t blame people who look “foreign” for doing what Japanese do too. I mean, just about everything foreign tourists do here are what Japanese also do at home — from littering to being loud in public to shoplifting (theft by Japanese is by far the largest crime in Japan), etc. etc. And it’s especially true for Japanese abroad, due to a philosophy of tabi no haji wa kakisute (“shed your shame when traveling”, with both positive and negative connotations).

Lose the racism and quit the bullying. And stand up to the bullies when necessary. Debito Arudou, Ph.D.

My SNA Visible Minorities column 56: “Addressing Japan’s Child Abduction Problem”, on the recent bill passed to allow joint custody after divorce (May 27, 2024)

Posted on May 28, 2024July 23, 2025 by Debito Arudou, Ph.D.

mytest

Hi Blog. Here’s my latest SNA column. There are mixed feelings from many people hurt by the Koseki System, but I hold the view that the new law allowing for Joint Custody after divorce is a step in the right direction. Read on and see what you think. Debito Arudou, Ph.D.

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ADDRESSING JAPAN’S CHILD ABDUCTION PROBLEM
By Debito Arudou, Ph.D., Shingetsu News Agency Visible Minorities column 56, May 27, 2024

Courtesy https://shingetsunewsagency.com/2024/05/27/visible-minorities-addressing-japans-child-abduction-problem/

It has been one of Japan’s worst-kept secrets. It has shattered lives and caused enormous international embarrassment to Japan’s reputation as a nation of laws. It has caused untold misery to countless children and families worldwide. And amongst all the G7 “developed” nations, it only happens like this in Japan.

I’m talking about Japan’s issues with child custody and access after divorce.

Japan has something called the Family Registry (koseki) system. It serves the important purposes of not only conferring Japanese citizenship, it also prioritizes the family unit over the individual. A throwback system unamended for more than a century, the Family Registry has a major bug: If you get divorced, the bureaucracy forces the couple as a registered family unit to cleave back into two unconnected individuals with completely severed family ties.

The problem is that children are likewise forced into one severed family registry or another, This means they lose all legal ties with one parent, and that parent (usually the father) has not rights of joint custody or child visitation.

This means that divorce in Japan completely disappears a “Left Behind Parent’ (LBP) from a child’s life.

This invisibility is enforced by the rest of society too. For example, if you want to visit your child’s school and find out how they’re getting along, the school will turn you away as a stranger. Or if you want to say hello to your child at home or on the street, your ex can call the police and have you arrested as a stalker. Even in extreme cases where the custodial parent dies or abandons the children, grandparents have adopted the kids (since the kids are still legally registered to that family unit) and shut out the LBP all over again! Despite this, LBP are obligated to pay child support. So essentially the system is there to punish you for ever getting divorced, since you lose everything and can’t even pay to play.

This cruel system affects everyone in Japan, Japanese citizen or not (as former Prime Minister and LBP Junichiro Koizumi can attest). But it hits international divorces especially hard. If you are, say, a foreign resident with a Spouse Visa you void your status to live and work in Japan. Then on top of that you get specially targeted by two evil narratives.

One is of course the racial profiling that happens when your ex siccs the police on you, and you get the regular third degree for existing while foreign in Japan. The other is a conviction that foreigners are naturally violent and prone to spousal or child abuse. Yes, people actually believe (and are repeatedly told by mass media and even the Japanese government) that despite all the bullying in Japan that goes on at home, school, and the workplace, foreigners are the ones who beat their children because of automatically presumed “cultural differences.”

Your rights are even fewer if you marry a Japanese and live overseas. Umpteen cases have been recorded of illegal child abductions (e.g., taking a child across an international border without the permission of both parents) by Japanese spouses fleeing to Japan. Sometimes they are assisted by abduction guidebooks you can find on Amazon Japan. Sometimes they have been actively abetted by the local Japanese consulate issuing them a new passport, in defiance of overseas court orders granting joint or sole custody to the Non-Japanese parent. And when the LBP comes to Japan to enforce the court order in Japanese court, they get ruled against because “habitual residence” has already been established here. She who dares, wins.

Many a Non-Japanese LBP has been arrested, gone on hunger strike, or even committed suicide due to this nightmarish lack of rights. And enough international arrest warrants on Japanese spouses have piqued the interest of foreign governments. Finally, after decades of overseas government pressure (gaiatsu), Japan signed The Hague Convention on International Child Abductions in 2014, only a decade ago. Unfortunately, Japan just caveated its way out of ever enforcing it.

People filing claims under the Convention rarely got a Japanese court to side with them. If the abduction took place many months ago, then “habitual residence” was established and that’s that. Or there’s the common prejudice that a child naturally belongs more with their mother. And one verbal claim of “child abuse” or “spousal violence” (which in Japan, according to some spokespeople, could include a raised voice, an angry look, or even a silent stare in an argument) is usually enough to close ranks. Plus there’s the conceit that Japan’s population is decreasing, so there’s a demographic interest in stopping depopulation through repatriation. We got our kid back, so that’s that.

This system has even inspired racism. As I mentioned before, the Japanese mass media and government surveys have long had a white-hot curiosity about finding what causes conflict in any international marriage. (Japanese men are pretty browned off about losing their women to foreigners—even though the majority of international marriages are Japanese men to foreign women—so there’s a smug satisfaction in knowing that foreign men aren’t perfect either.) But a Foreign Ministry pamphlet in 2014, issued shortly after Japan signed the Convention, clearly reinforced the narrative that foreigners are violent through illustrations depicting a Caucasian father beating his child. For good measure, the pamphlet also insinuated that Japanese can’t get a fair deal in a foreign court, and was clearly written working backward from a conclusion that the Convention disadvantaged Japanese.

Likewise, the most creative argument came from far-right propaganda network Sakura TV, which opined in 2018 that Japan’s signing the Hague Convention was just the judiciary trying to appease White people. The Convention’s main goal was to empower White men playing around with women from “uncivilized” countries, who would then divorce them in favor of White women, and convert their foreign playthings into de facto babysitters of their offspring. Therefore the Convention exists to ensure White cads still enjoy access to their bastard children!

But let’s return to reality and get to the good news occasioning this column. First, full disclosure: I too have been through a divorce in Japan and lost all contact with my children. So have many of my friends and colleagues, Japanese and foreign. I have argued before that nobody, Japanese or foreign, should get married under these conditions and have children, as it’s just too risky should the relationship sour. I stand by that argument even today.

But finally this May the Japanese Diet passed a law establishing joint custody. Starting in 2026 and working retroactively, this law means that both parents will now, at least on paper, legally have a say in a child’s upbringing after divorce. Unless both parents agree to sole custody, joint is presumed under Family Court proceedings.

Naturally, there will be caveats for accusations of domestic violence or child abuse. But these have to be recognized by a court case-by-case as legitimate concerns. It is the first change to Japan’s laws concerning parental authority in 77 years, and it will be revisited in five years to assess how well it’s working.

Not surprisingly, the response has been muted from my experienced colleagues. Some, inured to decades of Japan’s bad-faith negotiations and policing, doubt the law will ever be properly enforced. Signing the Convention didn’t work, so why should this? After all, what Japanese court would ever willfully give priority to a foreigner over a Japanese in a dispute? Or by now the law is too little, too late, as their children are all grown up and the damage is done for a lifetime. An outcome that makes up for all the past cruelty and denial is simply impossible.

Nevertheless, my take is that this new law is still good news. It’s better to have it than not. It can be pointed to as the law of the land, as opposed to a malleable norm that can be much more easily bent away from any LBP in any convoluted “he-said, she-said” dispute.

In principle, giving power to both parents over the well-being of a child is better than giving all power to one vindictive spouse. It will at least allow the possibility of a child hearing both sides of a story, which is a valuable skill set for anyone in their formative years. Moreover it will bring Japan back within international practices.

It’s been pretty much determined by child psychologists that, on average, children need both parents in their life. It’s about time the law in Japan reflected that. The Japanese government has finally taken that step in the right direction. Now let’s wait and see if it gets enforced in good faith.
ENDS

After decades of international exposure, embarrassment, broken treaty promises, xenophobic and racist tropes, and deprived children, Japan finally changes its laws to allow joint custody of children after divorce, taking effect in 2026.

Posted on May 19, 2024May 20, 2024 by Debito Arudou, Ph.D.

mytest

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Hi Blog. Debito.org has been quiet on these developments until they actually came to fruition, and now that they have, it’s time to cheer. Japan has finally gotten around to fixing one of its worst-kept secrets: Child Abductions after divorces. After years of international pressure (and all manner of racist justifications of the status quo, including even the Foreign Ministry accusing foreigners of being naturally violent, and Japan offering safe haven for international child abductions despite signing an international treaty against it), the Diet has just passed legislation allowing for joint custody after divorce. Meaning both parents now have the ability to have a say in raising a child even if the relationship falls apart. It comes into effect in 2026 and will be reassessed five years later.

Debito.org has talked about this issue for decades (since I too lost all contact with my children after my divorce, which is in fact the norm in Japan, thanks to the Koseki Family Registry system forcing split couples to sever all legal family ties and thus all rights to any contact). Not only because NJ are particularly vulnerable to becoming “Left Behind Parents” in intercontinental relationships (since the J spouse can either make off with the child back to Japan or deprive you of a Spouse Visa), but also because this situation affected ALL divorces in Japan, regardless of nationality. It left all children in Japan vulnerable to being used a pawn used to punish one parent out of spite. And that would often carry on into adulthood, with the adult offspring hating the LBP parent without ever hearing both sides of the story or knowing the LBP cares about them. This is not normal even in peer countries. As the Mainichi notes below, “Japan had been the only country among the Group of Seven industrialized nation with no joint custody system, according to a Justice Ministry survey of other countries released in 2020.”

Anyway, this is an extremely positive and long overdue development, and it’s another example of Japanese domestic law not changing without international shame and pressure. It’s just a shame it couldn’t have happened decades ago when it would have made a difference to me and my divorced friends. Let’s hope this brings more reality to future relationships. Divorces are complicated. Adding more child abuse into the mix (and by this I mean the child abuse that is inherent in an automatic severance of custodial ties) just made it worse. Debito Arudou, Ph.D.

(PS: I even wrote a novel on this subject, if you’re interested. Details here.)

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JAPAN / Crime & Legal
Japan changes law to allow joint custody after divorce
Legislation that allows the option of joint custody of children after divorce is passed at the Upper House plenary session on Friday.
AFP-Jiji/Japan Times, May 17, 2024
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2024/05/17/japan/crime-legal/japan-revises-law-to-allow-joint-custody/

Japanese lawmakers enacted legislation Friday that allows the option of joint custody of children after divorce.

For decades in Japan, one parent — almost always the mother — has been granted legal custody when a marriage ends, a rule seen by its supporters as a safeguard against domestic violence and child abuse.

But concerns have been raised that it can cause meaningful contact to be cut off between the other parent and their child.

Long-simmering frustrations of noncustodial parents — often fathers — over lack of access to children have helped build pressure for change.

A U.N. committee in 2019 recommended that Japan “allow for shared custody of children when it is in the child’s best interests, including for foreign parents.”

The new bill stipulates that sole custody be maintained if both parents agree it is the best option, or in court-recognized cases of domestic violence or child abuse.

One parent will also be able to make decisions without consulting the other on issues like schooling or health in “emergency circumstances.”

No official tallies exist for the number of minors cut off from a parent in Japan, but even so, campaigns both for and against the changes have been loud.

A 2022 survey carried out by a support group for single mothers found that 80% of single parents in Japan were against or disinclined toward joint custody.

“Even in cases of domestic violence, failure to prove it in court due to insufficient evidence can lead to joint custody being established,” campaigners against the move said in January. ENDS

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Japan passes a revised law allowing joint child custody for divorced parents for the first time
Japan’s parliament has passed a revision to the country’s civil code that will allow divorced parents the option of joint child custody, a change that brings the nation in line with many other countries
By MARI YAMAGUCHI Associated Press, May 17, 2024
https://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/japan-passes-revised-law-allowing-joint-child-custody-110330983

TOKYO — Japan’s parliament on Friday passed a revision to the country’s civil code that will allow divorced parents the option of joint child custody, a change that brings the nation in line with many other countries.

The revision, the first to custody rights in nearly 80 years, is to take effect by 2026. It will allow divorced parents to choose either dual or single custody while requiring them to cooperate in ensuring their children’s rights and wellbeing.

Under the current law, child custody is granted to only one divorced parent, almost always the mother.

The change comes as divorces are increasing in Japan and a growing number of divorced fathers hope to stay in touch with their children. A number of high-profile allegations made by divorced foreign fathers who blamed their former partners for abducting their children and returning to Japan also encouraged the change.

The revision requires the sharing of child rearing costs by the parent who is not the main custodian. Currently, most divorced mothers, who often are part-time workers with low incomes, do not receive financial support from their former husbands.

In cases in which domestic violence or abuse by either parent is suspected, the other person will have sole custody, according to the revision.

Supporters of joint custody say it allows both divorced parents to play a role in child rearing. Opponents, including rights groups and some victims of domestic violence, have raised concern that the new system could make it harder for parents to cut ties with abusive spouses and that they may not be allowed a real say in custody decisions.

The concerns prompted some modifications to the legislation during parliamentary debate to require authorities to make sure the custody decision was not one-sided.

Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshimasa Hayashi told reporters that the revisions address concerns raised by domestic violence victims and their families. But the improvements don’t go far enough and the risk remains high for vulnerable members in the families, said Kazuko Ito, a lawyer who has campaigned against the revision.

Under the revision, divorced parents who choose joint custody must reach a consensus on their children’s education, long-term medical treatment and other key issues, and will need to seek a family court decision if an agreement cannot be reached.

Either parent can make decisions about their children’s daily activities, such as private lessons and meals, or emergency treatment.

The revision is to be reviewed five years after it takes effect. ENDS

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Japan’s Diet passes bill to allow joint custody after divorce

The House of Councillors passes a bill during a plenary session in parliament in Tokyo on May 17, 2024, to introduce joint custody for divorced couples with children. (Kyodo)

May 17, 2024 (Mainichi Japan)

https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20240517/p2g/00m/0na/008000c

TOKYO (Kyodo) — Japan’s parliament on Friday passed a bill to introduce joint custody for divorced couples with children, in a landmark change that paves the way for the adoption of a practice widely used in other nations.

In the first law change regarding parental authority in 77 years, Japan’s Civil Code will permit divorced parents to choose either sole custody or joint custody, a shift from the current system that has only allowed custody by one parent — usually the mother.

The change comes as family relationships diversify in Japan amid a rise in couples splitting and eagerness by both parents to play a role in child-rearing. The current system has also posed challenges for foreign citizens seeking to maintain ties with their children if their divorced partners return to Japan with them.

About 160,000 minors in Japan experienced the divorce of their parents in 2022 alone, double the figure in 1950.

The revised law will enter into force within two years of its promulgation and be applied retroactively to those who have already divorced.

Under the revised Civil Code, parents will generally determine between themselves whether to opt for sole or joint custody, but if there is a dispute, a family court will intervene and decide on custody arrangements.

In cases where domestic violence and abuse by one of the parents is suspected, the other parent will have sole custody.

Proponents of the joint custody system say the revision allows both divorced parents to take part in child-rearing, but victims of domestic violence have voiced concern that the new system could hinder them from severing ties with their abusers as it would maintain connections to their former spouses.

Some also fear such victims may not be able to negotiate single custody or joint custody on an equal footing.

To address such concerns, the bill was modified during parliamentary deliberations to add a clause that calls for considering measures to “confirm the true intention” of each parent, but critics argue the government measures to protect domestic violence victims are too vague.

The new system will be reviewed five years after the revision come into force.

Under joint custody, consensus between parents is not required in making decisions on day-to-day matters, such as what to feed children and whether to vaccinate them.

Parents must reach consensus on important matters such as education and long-term medical treatment, but if they cannot do so in time in an urgent situation, one of the parents can decide on their own.

To avoid ambiguity in what would constitute an urgent situation, the government plans to provide clear examples.

The revision also includes measures against unpaid child support that will oblige a parent to provide minimum payments even if no agreement is reached upon divorce.

The new custody system is expected to increase the burden on family courts in Japan as they will play the role of ultimate arbiter for parents in complex situations in terms of child custody, such as judging whether domestic violence is involved.

Critics question whether family courts possess enough manpower to handle additional duties, with the number of cases filed with family courts rising to about 1.14 million in 2022, up nearly 300,000 from 2012, according to judicial statistics.

Prior to the revision, Japan had been the only country among the Group of Seven industrialized nation with no joint custody system, according to a Justice Ministry survey of other countries released in 2020.

Discussion of Japan’s sole custody system emerged partly in response to global criticism over parental abduction cases involving Japanese spouses who took children away from foreign partners after the failure of marriages and made it difficult for the foreign parent to see their children in Japan.

Japan joined in 2014 an international treaty to help settle cross-border child custody disputes. But in 2020, the European Parliament adopted a resolution urging Japan to improve its child custody rules, under which European parents in Japan have little recourse in the event of domestic child abduction by a Japanese spouse. ENDS

Reuters: Biden calls ally Japan ‘xenophobic’ along with rivals China and Russia (May 2, 2024). Bravo Biden!

Posted on May 16, 2024May 19, 2024 by Debito Arudou, Ph.D.

mytest

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Hi Blog. The next significant development over the past couple of weeks is POTUS Biden sounding off on xenophobia in Japan (and fellow ally India, as well as Russia and China), citing Japan’s inability to accept immigrants and harness their potential as a key issue in Japan’s longstanding economic doldrums.

(Reuters article on this below.)

COMMENT: Debito.org says “Bravo Biden!”, for obvious reasons we’ve covered on Debito.org since its beginning back in 1995. For generations now Japan has gotten a free pass on its racial discrimination (about which I’ve written entire books) simply because it’s an ally. It’s about time somebody in leadership chided things in the right direction. Unfortunately, geopolitics and human rights do not mix, and the latter has taken a back seat to the former for too long.

The response will be predictable and obvious. There will be the requisite handwringing from the diplomats and media, and the knee-jerk reactions from the ethnostatists defending Japan’s putative ethnic purity or sovereignty in various comments sections (although human rights supersede pat claims of sovereignty if you’ve signed the CERD, which Japan did nearly 30 years ago and still has not passed any laws against racial discrimination).

Whatever. It’s long overdue to state the fact that Japan as a polity simply will not keep its international promises, and Debito.org agrees with Biden that Japan’s lack of any official immigration policy hurts Japan as a society both economically and demographically. Debito Arudou, Ph.D.

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Biden calls ally Japan ‘xenophobic’ along with rivals China and Russia
BY JUSTIN SINK AND ISABEL REYNOLDS, BLOOMBERG
Reuters/Japan Times, May 2, 2024
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2024/05/02/japan/politics/biden-china-japan-india-xenophobia/

U.S. President Joe Biden included ally Japan along with rivals China and Russia in a list of countries he called “xenophobic” on Wednesday, in a speech at a campaign fundraising event in Washington.

Biden reiterated remarks he made last month linking China’s economic woes to its unwillingness to accept immigration. This time he added Russia, but also longstanding ally Japan, whose Prime Minister Fumio Kishida he welcomed for a summit and state dinner in Washington just three weeks ago.

“You know, one of the reasons our economy is growing is because of you and many others. Why? Because we welcome immigrants,” Biden told Asian American and Pacific Islander donors Wednesday. “The reason — think about it — why is China stalling so bad economically? Why is Japan having trouble? Why is Russia, why is anyone? Because they’re xenophobic, they don’t want immigrants.”

His criticisms and the fact that Japan was mentioned alongside two major U.S. rivals could raise hackles in Tokyo. The U.S. and Japan announced a “significant upgrade” to their defense ties last month, citing the need to counter China’s “dangerous” actions in the Indo-Pacific region.

The April summit in Washington was overshadowed by Biden’s stance on a plan for Japan’s Nippon Steel to buy United States Steel, after he said the firm should remain U.S.-owned.

Japan’s government acknowledges its aging and shrinking population is a source of concern, with Kishida himself saying the issue threatens society’s ability to function.

The country is also gradually opening the door to more immigrants, many of whom are filling jobs in sectors where there are shortages of workers.

The number of foreign residents in Japan rose to a record high of 3.4 million in December 2023, up 10% on the previous year and representing about 2.7% of the population of about 124 million.

A survey by the Asahi newspaper published last month found 62% of respondents said more foreign workers should be accepted, compared with 44% in a similar poll in 2018. ENDS

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(Prior comments from Debito.org Readers on the Biden statement starting here.)

My SNA Visible Minorities col 55: “From Dancing Monkey to Symbol of Hope”: Interview with Ibaraki Prefectural Assemblyman and naturalized Canadian-Japanese Jon Heese (May 2, 2024)

Posted on May 16, 2024May 16, 2024 by Debito Arudou, Ph.D.

mytest

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Hi Blog. Here’s my latest SNA column, where Jon Heese and I have yet another candid chat (previous ones here, here, and here) about politics in Japan — he as a politician, me as a columnist with a PoliSci background and a more adversarial relationship to power. Enjoy. I did. Debito Arudou, Ph.D.

Visible Minorities: From Dancing Monkey to Symbol of Hope
Shingetsu News Agency, May 02, 2024, by Debito Arudou
https://shingetsunewsagency.com/2024/05/02/visible-minorities-from-dancing-monkey-to-symbol-of-hope/

BIO: Jon Heese is becoming an old hand in Japanese politics, having served 13 years at various levels of government. He is presently one of five councilors representing Tsukuba (60 km NE of Tokyo) in the Ibaraki Prefectural Assembly—similar to a state or provincial legislature. After winning four terms at the city level, Mr. Heese leveled up in December, 2022. He is the first foreign-born politician to ever serve at the regional level. He sat down for an interview with Debito Arudou for his Visible Minorities column in April 2024.

SNA: Hi Jon. Thanks for agreeing to yet another interview with me.

Heese: It’s the least I can do for my favorite rabble rouser.

SNA: Let me open with an argument: I make the case in one of my recent columns (https://www.debito.org/?p=17392) that we don’t see enough former Non-Japanese running for office because the Japanese government doesn’t want them to. With no immigration policy, the GOJ doesn’t just encourage NJ to become voters and citizens, they make it hard to graduate up to Permanent Residency and citizenship. Would you agree with that assessment?

Heese: No immigration policy? Do you mean “no policy to import labor willy-nilly à la every western country?” The question is already loaded. As for policy to prevent naturalization, thereby enfranchisement, I do not see any active policies intending to keep NJ from getting citizenship. Overall I see their immigration policies as an attempt to ensure that only contributing foreigners are allowed to stay beyond the 90 day tourist visa by obtaining a longer visa. Many countries try to keep out deadbeats. Japan is no different. By deadbeats, I mean people who are only coming to take advantage of our rather generous social services.

SNA: Hang on. Point of order. We’re still falling back on those boilerplate arguments we see in the chauvinistic media that some foreigners are freeloaders. Not so. Every person in Japan one way or another pays some form of tax, and we’ve had study after study showing that migrants and immigrants on balance contribute more to every society than they take out. So let’s not resort to reflexive foreigner bashing “à la every Western Country”. Now back to your point about naturalization.

Heese: Immigrants are by their nature successful. The poorest and sickest cannot afford the cost of the trip, whether to pay for flights, boats, or other forms of transportation. Migrants demonstrate their motivation just by reaching our borders. Unsurprisingly they work hard to continue in their successful ways or leave for greener pastures. My “à la every Western Country” comment is a reference to how much stricter Japan is to whom they give visas.

SNA: And that’s kinda the point I’m making in my opening argument.

Heese: To continue, it’s been my observation that the highest bar for naturalization is Japan’s demand that new citizens give up their previous citizenship. Though I disagree with the government’s ban on dual citizenship, I believe the government, as representatives of the people, have the right to make the rules. Are their rules shortsighted? In my opinion, yes. Will they change those rules at some point? I believe they will. However, given that it’s actually easier to get citizenship than permanent residency, it’s not the government keeping people from voting, it’s the foreigners themselves that are keeping themselves from voting.

SNA: Okay, spoken like a true Japanese politician. Blame the foreigner for the rules that are set by the politicians and bureaucrats.

Heese: Would you have the foreigners setting their own rules…?

SNA: Yes. I think they should have some input into the process. They know better what’s best for them. Especially if they’ve leveled-up out of being foreign. To circle back to my opening point, the government is trying not to let them level up.

Heese: It is my understanding that only a few countries out there that allow non-citizens to vote. And those countries that do permit participation limit foreigners to local elections. I understand Japan’s logic but disagree with their fears of potential consequences.

SNA: Granted, I also make the case that NJ have to take it upon themselves to stop being “guests” and enfranchise themselves. You’ve advanced a similar argument (even to me when I considered running for office), only much more softly. Have you encountered much “guestism”?

Heese: I’m not entirely sure what you mean by “guestism,” but I will assume you mean foreigners who see themselves as guests in spite of their very heavy investments in land and life in Japan.

SNA: Yes, basically. What of it then?

Heese: I see guestism all the time. I have also seen quite an uptick in people taking citizenship. Back when you and I naturalized we were still outliers. That is no longer the case. I estimate that the experiences of those who have become Japanese has influenced the thinking of lifers. When I arrived in Japan in ‘91 it was years before I ever met a naturalized person. You may be the first one I ever talked to. Former Upper House Diet Member Tsurunen Marutei would likely have been the first I ever heard of. You can’t be what you can’t see. As more of us appeared, and, with the ability to share our experiences via social media, that we never had any issues getting through immigration, never felt pushback from our surrounding communities, indeed, life was really no different from pre to post naturalization, others took the plunge.

SNA: Yes, but that was then and this is now. I say there is a lot more pushback now. It’s harder to get Permanent Residency because you need a 3-year visa to get it, and there are plenty of incentives—and examples—of people being stuck on perpetual one-year visas. Then COVID really flipped the script, where even those who had graduated up to Permanent Residents suddenly realized that they were no better than any short-term visa holder. They were, in the end, just garden-variety foreigners who couldn’t come back if they left.

Heese: I would argue it’s much easier than when I first came in ’91 to get PR. My first experiences with PR lifers, they needed to have worked 10 (continuous) years or be married to a local to get their PR in 5 years. These days they are offering the same to desired workers after 3 years. Other workers only need 5 years. No Japanese family necessary. I would also point out it’s now easier to get citizenship. Back in our day we needed to have a Japanese spouse to get citizenship. No longer.

SNA: Just a quick interruption, sorry. That last bit is not actually true. I know of a number of single people who managed to naturalize despite being dedicated bachelors or unsavory characters. Delfo Zorzi or Nicola Zappetti, for example. And again, back to PR: Yes, the years are less on paper, but reaching the 3-year visa threshold is harder. I will agree with you, however, that naturalization is easier than PR nowadays. As long as you are willing to burn bridges with your country of origin, of course, and that’s no small thing.

Heese: I was told specifically back then I needed to be married. However, the Japanese bureaucracy does, on occasion, make exceptions. When I make the case these days to lifers, I point to what happened during the COVID pandemic. When the first travel bans were enacted there were no restrictions on the Japanese themselves. Japanese all had the right to come back. Yes, it was shameful, but the mewlings of you and I were not going to influence the Immigration officials.

SNA: Right. But again, the rules are not set by the foreigners, so I think mewling is warranted here. It was a border control policy grounded in racism, not immunological science.

Heese: No counterargument on my part. As the memory of the pandemic fades I will fall back to my initial argument of, “You have too much invested here for you to have no right to return.” In principle I ask lifers if they honestly believe they’re going back to their “homeland.” If not, then why are they holding on to some privilege they’ll likely never use? In addition, even if they give up their previous citizenship, it’s been my understanding that reacquiring their previous citizenship is pretty easy and straightforward.

SNA: Really? Maybe in Canada, but I doubt other countries are so forgiving. I’ve found that United States officials even view giving up US citizenship as an act of betrayal.

Heese: I think Canada would be more a world model than the US. Much of Canadian immigration policy would be influenced by the British Commonwealth. Last I saw there were more than 50 countries in the Commonwealth. In any case, I ask what is really being risked by taking citizenship? Importantly, why are they risking their working life’s investment for a “maybe someday” idea?

SNA: Okay, so to summarize, it’s clear that you’re very much on the side of the philosophy of “shit or get off the pot” when it comes to living in Japan as a Japanese citizen, even finding naturalization preferable to just taking out PR. Again, COVID made that choice much clearer. So how hard have you pushed people to naturalize and get elected? What arguments have you made to them to do so?

Heese: I would generally recommend PR before naturalization for people from developed countries. Immigrants from less developed societies likely have nothing to go back to so giving up their citizenship is not an issue.

Regarding my efforts to get others to run, there is one poor woman I’ve been hounding to run for city council for a decade already. By now it’s just a personal joke between us. She’ll never run but it wouldn’t surprise me if she naturalizes. I don’t understand why she hasn’t already. Different strokes, I guess.

SNA: Definitely. I too came this close to running for Sapporo City Council back in the day.

Heese: Yes you did. And your decision gave me a lot to ponder on. What I have come to realize is people run for their own reasons. The candidates best suited to run don’t need a dumbass like me to push them. At best I can show them the ropes. Towards that end I’ve written a few blog posts, one with instructions on how to run an election, and another outlining what I actually did as a city councilor. I think I shared those sites already. If not, I’ll pass them along.

SNA: Here they are : https://www.turning-japanese.info/2017/11/hashiru.html?q=running

There is a link to the second post in the first.

Heese: This year I’ve started a new project to log all my work activities at the prefecture, including travel times. You may have seen some of them on LinkedIn. As well as activities I try to liven my posts up with personal observations regarding the political system. People think politicians are the government. How naïve! I’m doing my best to show how much work and what the work involves. My job is not at all what people think it is.

SNA: Well, spill the tea, Marie. What exactly is your job? Sell it to us, since you even hound people to run.

Heese: Rather than just explaining my job, it will be useful to explain government. Understand that even after 15 years my views are still a work in progress.

SNA: As they should be. Politics is complicated. Any official who thinks they have all the answers is self-delusional. Please go on.

Heese: The government is actually a symbiosis of elected and unelected officials. I’ll start with the unelected officials, commonly known as civil servants. Their role is to maintain the machine as well as come up with solutions to problems society encounters on our common journey. Maintenance looks automatic but small adjustments still need to be made.

SNA: So you clearly fall into the camp of government exists in order to solve problems. For the record, I agree, but remember I came of age during Reagan and Friedman’s “small government” era, where “government is not the solution to the problem; government IS the problem.” And I’ve spent a lifetime realizing that good public policy is possible. Japan convinced me of that. Pity Japan, for its part, is too timid sometimes to solve problems because people fear taking responsibility for making mistakes or causing unintended consequences. Instead they should better prepare the public in advance for what the potentially positive or negative consequences of a policy might be. [Sighs] Yeah, maybe I should have run for office after all…

Heese: Ha! I believe you should have. Serving would have been an eye-opening experience for you. As for public problems, a considerable amount of effort is made creating, distributing, and analyzing questionnaires. Walk-ins also make requests at the various service counters, keeping the civil service well informed of the needs and wants of the people. It is from these questionnaires that new policy is born.

SNA: So you see policymaking in Japan as more bottom-up rather than top-down. I think most observers of Japan might think the opposite.

Heese: Yes, like everywhere the media poorly portrays how the sausage is really made. Generally the populace believe that civil servants are managed by the elected officials, thus the power lies with the politicians. I believe it’s the other way around. If you’ve ever had the pleasure to watch the BBC programs, “Yes, Minister,” and “Yes, Prime Minister,” their depiction of how government actually works is much closer to the truth than the media leads us to believe. If you haven’t watched it, it is MUST WATCH TV for anyone who wants to understand government. In my opinion it is the groups of unassuming civil servants who wield the greatest amount of collective power. Just as the CEO is the one who gets all the credit, it is more than likely the secretary that runs the ship.

SNA: Then policymaking in Japan actually is top-down, yes? Then why so many questionnaires? Are we actually seeing an example of successful Marxist “Democratic Centralism,” where input is collected from below and channeled upwards, but once the decision is made from the top, people below must follow it since they have given their input? Okay, sorry, I’ll stuff my PoliSci textbook back in my mouth and let you continue.

Heese: As I said, it’s a symbiosis. My role, as elected representative of the people, is to act as the immune system. My duties in council are generally to shoot down any brick balloons some aspiring group of civil servants might try to float past the house. That bills seldom get shot down is due to a deep understanding by the civil service of what the people want.

SNA: Okay, let me underscore this. As a politician, you see yourself as actually protecting the people from the bureaucrats?

Heese: Absolutely!!!!! One only needs to look at failing countries to see how terrible things can get when the bureaucracy or politicians capture the public purse. If the balance is off, look out!

My secondary job is to act as a mouthpiece for the people. I bring ideas and problems to the civil service they may not yet have been exposed to. However, I am also a teacher, in a sense. I find that I spend about 30% of conversations with citizens explaining how the system works. In addition, I listen to people’s issues and try to solve them by pointing them in the right direction, whether that’s toward the entry point of the government service they are looking for, or the company which will be able to handle their situation.

SNA: I doubt most people see politicians in Japan, or anywhere for that manner, so positively. Do you think most of your elected compadres have a similar view of themselves being a dedicated public servant?

Heese: That is a very good question I’ll need to ask. I’m sure the topic will provide some interesting fodder. Ask me again in 6 months and I’ll spill what I learned.

How I personally approach the public relations part of the job is to engage as many people as I can on any given day. I try to be approachable. I can’t possibly know what people’s needs are beyond Maslow’s basics. And I’ll never know if they don’t tell me.

SNA: Huh. Well, that’s a bit strange to me. In my dealings with Japanese politicians in the past, especially when I was trying to get legislation passed to outlaw racial discrimination and get “Japanese Only” signs down, I rarely saw them giving much more than a popcorn fart about listening to the people. Perhaps it was the complexity of the issue. Perhaps it was because people who look like me probably can’t vote so who cares? But for the most part, if there wasn’t an election at hand, I found Japanese politicians at best noncommittal, at worst actively avoiding any chance to listen to folks like you say you do. Are you an outlier?

Heese: Of course I’m an outlier. To be blunt, I take the approach of being constantly in election mode. I don’t have an election machine I can just fire up nor can I assume I’ll get reelected simply because I’m an incumbent. I’ve seen too many cases of incumbents getting their walking papers to believe it can’t happen to me. In my case every vote is won at the individual level so I am required to be out and about.

I am, by nature, very curious. I am always happy to listen to what people do. In “The Tipping Point,” Malcolm Gladwell mentions three kinds of people: Connectors, Mavens, and Salesmen. I do my best to be a bit of all three but I know I am best suited to be a Connector. I don’t know enough about any given topic to be a Maven and my ideas aren’t well developed enough to be a Salesman. Hence, I spend a lot of time just trying to get to know people and introducing them to others who can help them.

SNA: I plead guilty to being a Maven.

I can’t speak to your experiences with other politicians except to say that NJ needs are seldom a high priority, not because their needs aren’t important, but because there’s unlikely to be traction within the surrounding community. Your concerns regarding “Japanese Only” signage won’t be showing up in questionnaires either.

On the other hand, here in Tsukuba, where foreigners are plentiful and a vital part of the community, such a sign would only last a day or two before the Mayor’s office would come down like a ton of bricks on any business foolish enough to post one. On a few occasions I’ve been informed, for example, of a policy that a local gym, a chain, has implemented requiring members to be able to communicate in Japanese. Their argument is safety in case of an injury. Pure BS. The problem is invariably a new manager from outside Tsukuba thinks they can run their shop like they do in Butthole-shi. Have staff who speak English ya moron! Or train them in basic English. Easy enough in highly educated Tsukuba. I’ve spoken to the mayor about the issue and he was very attentive, requesting I pass on unresolved instances.

So, to summarize my job, I shoot down bad ideas, promote good ones, and introduce people to others with solutions to their problems. To be blunt, I love my job, but I also recognize that not everyone can do it. One needs a tough skin to withstand the slings and arrows of outrageous allegations.

SNA: I’ll say. Again, I’m not sure I’d have the patience to put up with what I see you putting up with, just from the standpoint of shrugging off your how you’re treated occasionally as an outsider or an anomaly in the halls of power. But that’s perhaps a topic for a future interview. That’s really all the time we have for today. I want to thank you for agreeing to another interview with me, Jon. I look forward to slinging some arrows at you again next time.

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Heese: We all have our roles to play. At times I’m the dancing monkey. On other occasions I am the symbol of hope for newbies straight off the boat. I do my best to play my part well. Thanks for keeping me on my toes. I look forward to our next conversation. ENDS

Debito cited in article, “Japan is becoming more diverse. Will its government?” Christian Science Monitor, April 12, 2024. As are several other naturalized and elected Japanese citizens originating from Canada, Uzbekistan, Syria/Egypt, and Bolivia.

Posted on April 16, 2024May 16, 2024 by Debito Arudou, Ph.D.

mytest

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Hi Blog. What follows is an insightful article on how NJ are becoming Japanese to the point where they’re getting elected at the local level. Meaning it’s possible. This is, in Debito.org’s view, a good thing, because having diverse voices enfranchised in a democracy does matter at the policymaking level. Groundwork for this article also inspired one of my recent SNA columns, where the reporter asked me if this was real evidence that fundamental changes were afoot. The exchange went something like this:

Reporter: “I think Heese, Orzugul, Inoue, and Sultan offer interesting insights into the shifting demographics of Japan. But none of them are Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese and Filipino—the four groups who make up the most non-Japanese residents. Do you think it is easier for certain types of Non-Japanese to gain power and acceptance in the country?”

Debito: “I don’t know. There is certainly a hierarchy of treatment based upon country of origin and skin color in Japan, especially in naturalization processes. But certainly people of Chinese and Korean ancestry have been elected in the past. Probably when other ethnic groups aren’t overworked, underpaid, and restricted to unstable visa statuses, we’ll see more of them naturalizing and running for office.” Debito Arudou, Ph.D.

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Japan is becoming more diverse. Will its government?
By Takehiko Kambayashi, Christian Science Monitor April 12, 2024. Article with photos of the interviewed at:
https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Asia-Pacific/2024/0412/japan-immigrants-local-government
TOKYO, KAWAGUCHI, AND TSUKUBA, JAPAN

A former swimming instructor from Egypt is helping revive the sleepy mountain town of Shonai, Japan. About 200 miles away, a Canadian polyglot is singing the praises of Tsukuba city. And Orzugul Babakhodjaeva is standing onstage at a food festival outside Tokyo, decked in a traditional Uzbek dress, expressing her desire to “create a society where diversity is accepted.”

The first-term city councilor in Tokyo’s Setagaya Ward – who does not use her family name, and campaigned simply as “Orzugul” – is one of a small but growing number of foreign-born local government members bringing fresh perspectives to an island nation long known for its homogeneity. These lawmakers are often multilingual and have rich international work experience. Their platforms have resonated with many Japanese voters, as well as with a growing population of non-Japanese residents.

The number of non-Japanese residents jumped 10.9% from 2022 to 2023, reaching a record 3.4 million, as the country struggles to address a chronic labor shortage driven by its aging population. Last year, 8,800 residents were naturalized as citizens, allowing them to vote in elections.

Shifting demographics are challenging Japan’s reputation as a homogeneous society – and creating unprecedented openings for immigrants to participate in local government.

Arudou Debito, author of the book “Embedded Racism: Japan’s Visible Minorities and Racial Discrimination,” says the election of immigrants to local government is “very important” for Japan’s democracy.

“Non-Japanese residents’ viewpoints are woefully unseen in Japanese society. They’re treated as ‘guests,’” explains Mr. Arudou, who is a U.S.-born naturalized citizen. “The fact that former non-Japanese residents are getting elected means they aren’t ‘guests,’ meaning Japanese society can trust immigrants with public policymaking power.”

Outsiders’ lens

About 30 miles northeast of Tokyo, first-term Ibaraki Prefectural Assembly member Heese Jon cuts a dapper figure as he drives a reporter around the city of Tsukuba, boasting about its 360 parks and its culinary delights. The city also hosts the University of Tsukuba, the headquarters of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, and other leading institutes.

“We are sitting at the heart of Japanese research,” says the native Canadian from the driver’s seat of his electric vehicle.

About 12,700 non-Japanese residents from 144 countries live in Tsukuba, making up 5% of its population, nearly twice the national rate of 2.8%.

Before his victory in the 2022 assembly election, Mr. Heese had already served four terms as a Tsukuba city councilor and won the most votes for three straight elections. He credits his popularity to his passion for women’s issues and the environment, as well as to his fresh face.

“The incestuousness of the political scene is really stunning,” he says. Especially in smaller cities, politicians “are almost all related to each other.” On billboards displaying local candidates, he stands out.

“One thing they can say is, ‘This is not someone who can be bribed,’” he says.

Tsukuba resident Sciortino Atsuko, who is married to an immigrant, believes that local government needs to reflect the city’s diversity. She says Mr. Heese, being married to a Japanese woman and raising kids in Tsukuba, understands the experience of being in an interracial family.

“Jon has long supported a non-Japanese community here, and played a role as a bridge with the government,” she says. “When non-Japanese speakers were in trouble at shops or gyms, Jon was the one who helped them out. … Jon has brought the needs of the minority to the table.”

Mr. Heese, who speaks five languages, says his long-term goal is to “bring politicians from all over Japan to foreign countries and be their guide. They do not look beyond their communities very far.”

Bolivian-born Inoue Noemi, a fourth-term member of Tokyo’s Sumida City Council, agrees that Japan can be an inward-looking country. “We need to go global,” she says.

Ms. Inoue worked at Bolivia’s central bank and the United Nations Development Program before moving to Japan in the late 1990s with her husband, a former member of parliament.

Inoue Noemi, a fourth-term member of Tokyo’s Sumida City Council, is from Bolivia. When she first came to Japan in the 1990s, women’s low social status was “the most shocking issue,” she recalls.

Before her first stint in local government in 2011, Ms. Inoue founded the Japan-Latin America Friendship Association in Tokyo to develop cultural, social, and business relations overseas. She also taught Spanish and still sees language barriers as a big problem.

Non-Japanese residents often have trouble communicating with police and hospital staff, she says. When facing problems from bullying to domestic abuse, few know what to do or where to go. Such information is not readily available in their languages.

Back in 2021, Sultan Nour was seriously considering leaving the northern town of Shonai, where he’d moved five years prior to be closer to nature. Like many rural areas in Japan, Shonai had struggled with severe depopulation, and no longer had any pediatricians. Mr. Sultan, who was born in Syria and grew up in Egypt, had two small children to care for.

But then he stumbled upon news of an upcoming by-election for the Shonai Town Assembly, and decided to go for it. He won that race and the next one, securing reelection with the highest vote count of all the candidates.

“I have long wanted to contribute to society,” says Mr. Sultan, who had taught English, managed an Arabic restaurant, and worked for a construction company in Japan before running for local office. He also works as an Arabic interpreter for authorities.

Change came in December 2023: Thanks in large part to continued pressure from Mr. Sultan and other parents, Shonai’s main hospital now has a pediatrician four days a week.

It’s not the end of Mr. Sultan’s mission in Shonai.

Japan’s population is aging rapidly, and like other policymakers who face the daunting task of reinvigorating Japan’s rural towns, Mr. Sultan emphasizes the need to “put more efforts into child care support, measures for the falling birthrate, and job creation.”

Ms. Inoue sees immigrants as a key part of the solution – but they need support. “Japan needs to have good immigration law to support foreigners to find a job and live a decent life,” Ms. Inoue says. “Now foreigners come, but nobody wants to rent a house to them.”

Her comments echo the experience of Orzugul, who was rejected by 53 companies when she first arrived in Japan, mainly because she did not graduate from a Japanese university. Later, she found it almost impossible to rent an apartment or business space in Tokyo without her Japanese husband present.

Despite the discrimination she faced, “I love Japan deeply,” says Orzugul. “That’s why I cannot look the other way. I would like to help open up doors to those who seek opportunity in this country.”
ENDS

My SNA Visible Minorities 54: “Non-Japanese Residents claim political power” (Mar 31, 2024), where I argue the power of the vote matters whether you are a candidate or part of the electorate; the J Govt tries hard to make sure neither happens for Japan’s Immigrants.

Posted on March 31, 2024May 16, 2024 by Debito Arudou, Ph.D.

mytest

Hi Blog. My latest SNA column talks about how NJ do have the ability to get some political power in Japan. It will of course mean some work on their part, but that’s inevitable for all minorities anywhere. But the biggest obstacle, aside from the willful exclusion of NJ from the electorate, is the will to naturalize and run for office. You can do it, and I believe it’s likely you’ll get in, since the Japanese electorate is really quite hungry for something different to choose from. But you’ve gotta stop believing that you’re merely a “guest” in Japan in the first place. Read on to see some examples of elected former NJ and take note. Debito Arudou, Ph.D.

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Non-Japanese Residents claim political power despite obstacles
Shingetsu News Agency, Visible Minorities column 54, March 31, 2024
Courtesy https://shingetsunewsagency.com/2024/03/31/visible-minorities-non-japanese-residents-claim-political-power/

I teach Political Science at the university level. In my first lecture every semester, I try to convince skeptical students why they should bother studying Political Science at all.

I argue that understanding how power flows through political structures will help students enfranchise themselves in a democratic system. Because if they don’t, other people who understand the system better will use it to their advantage instead.

But this assumes one major fundamental: that they can participate in the democratic system at all. Fortunately, most of my students are citizens, so they can vote. Given how abysmal youth voter turnout generally is, I consider it a major educational outcome if they bother to. Persuading people that their vote matters is the bare minimum a civics class can accomplish.

If I have the opportunity in higher-level classes to proselytize further, I encourage them to engage in community building, such as organizing into interest groups and consolidating power into voting blocs.

My real converts consider running for local office, thereby embedding themselves within the very power structure itself. Because political power, especially for minorities in any society, is rarely surrendered without a struggle. We need more diverse views in office as demographics change the makeup of future majorities.

That’s how democracy is supposed to work. Unfortunately, this is a lesson that Japan’s Non-Japanese (NJ) Residents and Visible Minorities still have trouble grasping. As a result, they are letting the Japanese government deprive them of their potential as a political force in Japan.

GETTING BEYOND THE “GUESTISM”

A lot of the issue is that, as I have written before, many of Japan’s minorities believe they really don’t have the ability—or even the right—to shape Japanese society. They convince themselves that they are merely “guests” in Japan—not taxpayers and residents—and therefore have no say in how they’re treated by public policy.

After all, they’re in Japan by choice, and if they don’t like the way things are, they should go “home.” They’ve internalized the narrative that Japan is not “home” and foreigners don’t belong here.

This dehumanizing mantra is well-established and reinforced on a daily basis. But less considered are the underlying political structures enforcing it. It’s hard to have a stake in a society when it might be booting you out shortly.

Official permission to work, i.e., visas, are generally only one to three years in duration, sometimes non-renewable, and often tethered to a specific job sponsor. This means many NJ can’t change jobs without losing their visa and risking going to jail as overstayers. Employers, of course, are happy with this situation, leveraging this vulnerability to abuse and exploit NJ workers even further. Thus all the incentive structures are there to make NJ life in Japan temporary and miserable.

But consider one more disenfranchising mechanism: The larger scheme to make sure NJ never coalesce into interest groups and voting blocs.

In other societies, minorities, newcomers and immigrants cluster in like-minded regions where they can create communities. Harlem. Chinatowns. The Navajo Nation. Little Tokyo, Little Armenia, and Little Saigon. The Dearborn Muslims. New York’s Jewish communities. The Polish Patches. The Castro District. The proposed states of Jefferson and Deseret. And the majority-minority states of Hawaii, California, Texas, Nevada, New Mexico, Maryland, and soon Georgia.

Once people reach a critical mass in a population, they can foster entire social movements, even elect representatives and become an unignorable political force.

PREVENTING RESIDENTS FROM BECOMING VOTERS

But Japan makes sure NJ never reach a critical mass. Whenever we hear about, for example, Chinese buying up land in an area, out come the politicians stoking fear about Chinese becoming the local majority and “seceding from Japan.” Essentially, the logic is that more foreigners means less Japan, and if NJ ever get power over Japanese, Japan is lost. That’s especially visible when NJ are officially denied administrative roles in any public sector positions.

Then there’s simply getting rid of NJ Residents by not renewing visas en masse. Clean house and ethnically cleanse. The lost historical Iranian, Filipina, and Brazilian communities in Japan are testament to that.

But even without a critical mass, power within a democracy is granted to people who can vote, so Japan makes sure NJ Residents never become part of the electorate.

Japan still has no official immigration policy to encourage NJ Residents to become Japanese citizens. Further, whenever Japan announces an expansion to any working visa program, politicians at even the highest levels of government are quick to clarify this does not mean these migrants will become immigrants. The very word “immigrant” (as in a person) isn’t an established concept in Japanese policymaking circles.

This situation seems unlikely to change, despite the recent resumed mass migration into Japan. Japan’s NJ Registered Resident population reached a record high of 3.4 million in 2023, up more than 10% over the previous year.

Yet the government has made it more difficult over the past two decades to go from a one-year visa to a three, not to mention obtain Permanent Residency.

The numbers reflect this. Although the largest group of NJ Residents are Permanent Residents, their numbers only grew about 3% in 2023.

Then there’s the issue of actually taking out Japanese citizenship, as this author has. Yet the number of people who have naturalized on average over the past decade is less than 1000 per year, and on a general downward trend.

No wonder. After years languishing in nasty jobs and jumping through so many visa hoops, getting Japanese citizenship is often a very arbitrary process, with applications rejected even for parking tickets and “cultural incongruities.” There’s also favoritism shown to applicants from countries with richer economies and lighter skins. Not to mention the identity sacrifice of forcing people to give up their birth nationality.

IMMIGRANT POWER AND POLITICIANS IN JAPAN

Consequently, the only NJ groups in Japan that have accrued any political power are the Zainichi generational “foreigners.” They’re the Japan-born descents of the former citizens of empire, who have lived in Japan more than a century yet are still “foreigners.” Also known as the “Oldcomers,” they have formed lobbying groups such as as Mindan, Mintoren, and Soren. Then there are also historical and indigenous minority groups such as the Burakumin Liberation League and Utari Kyoukai. They all have managed to move the needle on how minorities are portrayed in the media.

But in terms of shifting real political power, there is no substitute for getting the vote and a seat at the policymaking table. And that means overcoming it all to become a citizen and get elected to office.

That happens, even in Japan. Perhaps the most visible case was Finland-born Tsurunen Marutei, who not only served in his local town council in Kanagawa Prefecture from 1992, he also served two terms in Japan’s national Diet from 2002 to 2013.

Others have since followed. Decades ago US-born Anthony Bianchi and Canadian-born Jon Heese won back-to-back city council seats in Inuyama and Tsukuba respectively. Bianchi has since retired, but Heese (whom I have interviewed for this column before) has since graduated up to a prefectural-level elected position.

We have also seen incumbents such as Bolivian-born Noemi Inoue, elected in 2011 to the Sumida-ku Assembly; Syrian-born former Egyptian Sultan Nour, elected in 2021 to Shonai Town Assembly in Yamagata Prefecture; and Uzbekistan-born Babakhodjaeva Orzugul, elected to a seat in Tokyo’s Setagaya-ku Assembly in 2023.

Notably, all of them won their seats quite easily, some even getting the highest number of votes of all candidates running, despite the fact that their fellow NJ Residents cannot vote for them. Bravo.

A reporter recently asked me if this meant change in Japan was afoot.

My answer was that yes, this is not something we’ve seen before, and Visible Minorities claiming the right (and the structural power) to be Japanese is a positive change. I think anyone who wants to see the change has to be the change, and they’re doing that.

How did they win so handily? My theory is that given Japan’s single-party democracy, I think the Japanese electorate are hungry for any hope of change. Something different. Newcomer Immigrant Japanese can be precisely that. So for once, being seen as an outsider in Japan can be an advantage.

This theory also holds when you consider the opposite example: When Diet Member Tsurunen didn’t offer his constituents anything new beyond having blue eyes (seriously, that was his slogan), he got voted out. They realized he was basically running more for himself than them. So you really have to be the change, not just look it.

Finally, the reporter said, “I think Heese, Orzugul, Inoue, and Sultan offer interesting insights into the shifting demographics of Japan. But none of them are Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese and Filipino—the four groups who make up the most non-Japanese residents. Do you think it is easier for certain types of Non-Japanese to gain power and acceptance in the country?”

My answer was this:

“I don’t know. There is certainly a hierarchy of treatment based upon country of origin and skin color in Japan, especially in naturalization processes. But certainly people of Chinese and Korean ancestry have been elected in the past.

“Probably when other ethnic groups aren’t overworked, underpaid, and restricted to unstable visa statuses, we’ll see more of them naturalizing and running for office.”

We’ll talk again with Jon Heese about running for office next column.

Debito.org Reader XY on “Rakuten Card is asking for sensitive Koseki Family Registry documents for Naturalized Japanese clients as a prerequisite for continued service”, even though nobody is clearly requiring them to.

Posted on March 8, 2024March 8, 2024 by Debito Arudou, Ph.D.

mytest

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Hi Blog. Forwarding with permission from Debito.org Reader XY. Lightly redacted. The dragnet of suspecting any foreigner, including NJ Residents, of being a money launderer expands to people who are no longer foreign as well. Debito Arudou, Ph.D.
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From: XY
Subject: Rakuten Card is asking for Koseki of Naturalized Japanese clients
Date: March 4, 2024
To: “debito” <debito@debito.org>

Dr. Debito,

I’m writing you because I’m experiencing a new type of discrimination by Rakuten Card.

I’ve been a Rakuten Card owner since 2014, and it is the card I’ve hold the longest, making it the biggest chunk of my credit history.

Also, I’m a naturalized Japanese citizen, that naturalized back in 20XX, and one month afterwards I had already completed all the requirements for change of name and status according to what I was asked by Rakuten Card, which, if I remember correctly, required me to send copies of documents proving my change of name and status.

About a month ago, I received a mail by Rakuten Card asking me to send them a copy of my current Residence Card. I was very confused by this, so I contacted them, and they told me that since when I applied for the Card I was a foreigner, I needed to provide them with something that “proved” my residence status, and they asked me for my koseki, which is insane.

I told them that I already gave them the documents they required back when I naturalized, that I’ve never been asked this by any other Bank or Credit Card company, and that it is insane for them to ask me for a Koseki Family Registry, which is a very sensitive document that should be handed for these kind of requests, since something as simple as my Juminhyo Residency Certificate, which I think is what I sent back in 20XX proved my nationality, and they also have my “My Number” information, which should gave them access to corroborate this.

They insisted that this was something that the Financial Services Agency as part of an anti Money Laundering KYC thing, I asked them to give me more specifics on this, and they refused to do so, so I called the Financial Services Agency, and they told me in non ambiguous terms that they have not asked Rakuten Card to do this, that the Agency is in fact not responsible for this stuff regarding Credit Cards, and that the people responsible for all Anti Money Laundering guidelines and such are actually the Police.

I called once again Rakuten Card to confront them with this information, and in very wishy washy terms, being careful of not making any definitive statements about it, that this was part of some measured BASED on some ambiguous public request by the Financial Services Agency which they cannot give any specifics for, and that unless I provide them with my Koseki, they will terminate my contract.

I pointed out how this is obviously discrimination, as getting a card as a Japanese citizen NEVER requires you to give your Koseki, and if I wanted, I could just cancel my current account, and then open a completely new one, and there would be no requirements like these, and even though they acknowledged that I could do that, they continue to say that unless I give them my Koseki they will cancel my account, and that “this will not change no matter what”. I asked them to then reimburse me for the cost of getting my Koseki, and of course they said they couldn’t do that.

To be honest, right now I rarely use my Rakuten Card, as it has become more and more useless over the years, and I have way better cards that have never discriminated against me, so outside of the credit history, I don’t care so much about losing that card, but this is 100% without a doubt a discriminatory treatment against someone who is a Japanese citizen.

At this moment, I’m trying to get in contact with regulators to tell them about what Rakuten Card is doing to their customers, and if necessary, I’m also thinking of taking legal action against Rakuten Card if they in fact cancel my contract. – XY

My SNA Visible Minorities column 53: “Miss Japan Shiino Karolina lost her crown. Inevitably.” (Feb 26, 2024)

Posted on February 27, 2024 by Debito Arudou, Ph.D.

mytest

Hi Blog. People have been clamoring for me to write about this case. Well, here you go. No surprises in my conclusion, probably. Just some new research. Enjoy. Debito Arudou, Ph.D.

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MISS JAPAN SHIINO KAROLINA LOST HER CROWN, INEVITABLY

By Debito Arudou. Shingetsu News Agency, Visible Minorities Column 53 February 26, 2024

Courtesy https://shingetsunewsagency.com/2024/02/26/visible-minorities-miss-japan-karolina-shiino-lost-her-crown-inevitably/

You might have heard the big news last month about Shiino Karolina, a Ukrainian-born Japanese citizen who won the title of Miss Japan.

You have also heard earlier this month that she lost her crown due to allegations of her having an affair with a married man.

Yappari. I thought that might happen. How convenient. Let’s put this event in perspective.

This not the first time a Japanese beauty contest in has chosen a person not “pure-blooded” to represent Japan. In 2015, African-American-Japanese Miyamoto Ariana was chosen as Miss Japan in 2015.

This was big news back then too for winning despite her biracial status. I say “despite” because oodles of internet trolls questioned whether a half-Japanese could represent Japan.

And guess what? She could, since lightning struck a second time a year later, when Indian-Japanese Yoshikawa Priyanka was crowned Miss World Japan.

However, with Shiino, the third time was not the charm. She only lasted two weeks. Why? Because she was a bridge too far.

Shiino, who came to Japan as a child from Ukraine and was raised and naturalized in Japan, was admitted to the contest on the basis of her Japanese citizenship, meaning without any blood-quantum qualifier.

This is a very positive step, as it acknowledges that “Japaneseness” is a legal status. (And yes, this pronouncement came with all the caveats that she’s a fluent speaker, acculturated, “more Japanese than we are” from all the people who would vouch. Phew.)

Shiino’s win showed that people can become Japanese over time, not just be ascribed it from birth and bloodlines.

This matters to Japan’s rapidly depopulating society. If Japan can bring immigrants over and see them as “Japanese” like any other, well enough to represent Japan even if you don’t “look” it, this portends well for Japan’s inevitable international future.

But then came the backlash.

The first problem was the media making a big deal of this for the wrong reasons. Instead of heralding the positive steps and future implications for Japanese society, they used racialized headlines (most without even mentioning Shiino by name, making her an issue instead of a person) to focus on how they anticipated readers would react. Never mind the judges’ decision, where she won because of her looks. Media once again made her win a “despite.”

Media also empowered the self-proclaimed Identity Police. Instead of focusing on the voices of how Shiino was in fact Japanese, media again devoted an outsized proportion of space to the trolls who reinforce the unhealthy narrative that “real” Japanese have to look a certain way.

The trolls should not even make the news. There are racists in every society, and their unhealthy hate will always be underground chatter. Unearthing and megaphoning them just resuscitates their dying ideologies. Manufacturing drama for the sake of clickbait is irresponsible pandering.

The second problem here is with “beauty contests” in general. They are a throwback idea that women should be pedestaled just because they won the “lovely lottery”. Too bad for all those who “fell out of the ugly tree at birth and hit every branch on the way down.” (There’s a half-trillion-dollar cosmetics industry to help fix that, of course.)

Remember the origin of these pageants. According to a well-researched article in Honolulu Magazine, “the first modern contests involving the judging of women’s outward appearance can be credited to P.T. Barnum, one of the country’s greatest showmen, who also held national contests for dogs, chickens and babies, in 1854.”

So putting people on display like dogs and chickens was always problematic. And by “people,” of course we mean “women.” Where are the international beauty pageants similarly subjecting men to the “male gaze”?

Now put it through the Japan filter, where looks are linked to citizenship: you have to “look Japanese to be Japanese.”

Thus any contest that focuses on “looks” means Japan adds an extra hurdle. “Shiino doesn’t even look Asian, let alone Japanese. How can she possibly represent ‘us’?”

Try claiming that a Visible Minority (or a Person of Color, however defined) doesn’t represent “us” in a lot of other societies, and then try to dodge the accusation of being a “racist country.”

The same embedded racism is so hard-wired in that you see it in overseas ethnic-transplant societies.

In Hawai’i, for example, there are the Miss Chinatown Hawai’i, the Narcissus Festival, The Cherry Blossom Festival, the Miss Latina Hawai’i and the Miss O’ahu Filipina beauty contests, where contestants have to exhibit sufficient blood quanta to qualify.

For the Japanese exhibitors, purity of bloodline mattered. The Cherry Blossom Festival wasn’t even open to “multiethnic Japanese-American women” until 1999. And that’s before you get the extra layer of now having to be stewardesses not just of countries, but of entire cultures.

But back to the worldwide pageants where ethnic identity is less important than looking good in a swimsuit. You still have the issue of, “Who can represent ‘us’?” And what befell Shiino is similar to what happened to Vanessa Williams, the first African-American woman to win Miss America in 1984.

Out came the Identity Police back then too: A black woman representing America? Oh hell no. Eventually Williams lost her crown due to nude photographs taken two years prior.

Now with Shiino: A Ukranian-Japanese with no Japanese blood whatsoever representing Japan? Oh hell no. Find a reason to dethrone her.

It only took two weeks to find a sex scandal. After all, pageant women are also supposed to be virginal and available too. (Hence the “Miss” in the title.) Being c*ck-blocked by a married man sort of spoils the male gaze.

Nevertheless there’s a whiff of hypocrisy to what happened to Shiino. It’s hard to believe other contestants weren’t also having sex as consenting adults. So why Shiino? Because the pageant organizers didn’t anticipate how controversial a win by a Japanese without any bloodline would be. They blinked and looked for an off-ramp.

The sad conclusion to draw from this case is that Shiino Karolina got hers. Japan still isn’t ready to recognize Japaneseness as a legal status instead of an ethnic bloodline, and people will still resort to any means to revert to type. In this case, blood type.

But if you really want to fix this situation, you’ll abandon beauty contests altogether. They just bring out bad habits in society, and at the expense of women.

Reuters: Visible Minorities (“Foreign-born residents”) file lawsuit against government for police racial profiling. Good. Go for it.

Posted on January 30, 2024January 30, 2024 by Debito Arudou, Ph.D.

mytest

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Foreign-born residents file suit in Japan over alleged racial profiling
By Chris Gallagher
Reuters January 29, 2024, courtesy of Senaiho
Article with excellent video on the case with statements from the Plaintiffs at
https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/foreign-born-residents-file-suit-japan-over-alleged-racial-profiling-2024-01-29/

TOKYO, Jan 29 – Three foreign-born residents of Japan filed a lawsuit on Monday against the national and local governments over alleged illegal questioning by police based on racial profiling.

It is the first such lawsuit in Japan, according to the plaintiffs’ lawyers, and comes amid a sharp rise in the number of foreign workers coming to the country to help stem labour shortages as its population ages and declines.

It also comes amid a renewed debate over what it means to be and look Japanese, after a Ukrainian-born, naturalised Japanese citizen was crowned Miss Japan last week.

The three men filed the lawsuit with the Tokyo District Court demanding that the national, Tokyo Metropolitan and Aichi Prefecture governments recognise that it is illegal for police officers to stop and question people solely on the basis of their race, nationality or ethnicity.

The plaintiffs say they have suffered distress from repeated police questioning based on their appearance and ethnicity, which they say is a violation of the constitution.

The Tokyo Metropolitan Government, Aichi Prefectural Government and National Police Agency all declined to comment, while representatives of the Ministry of Justice could not be reached. ENDS
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COMMENT: I won’t decline to comment. Debito.org has reported at length on how racial profiling is standard operating procedure for the Japanese police, so it’s an issue that deserves to be pursued in court. We’ve also sued the government before, and think it’s unlikely they’ll win (we didn’t). But it’s worth doing for the awareness raising. If we can get it on the record that the judiciary recognizes this as “racial profiling”, or even that “racial profiling” actually exists in Japan as a term and a phenomenon, this will be a big step ahead. Plaintiffs, go for it, and good luck, says Debito.org. Debito Arudou, Ph.D.

PS. This has made big international news, the likes I haven’t really seen since the Otaru Onsens Case. Good. Links to sources here.

Here’s another good one:

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3 foreign-born residents in Japan file suit over claims of racial profiling by police
January 29, 2024 (Mainichi Japan), courtesy of Kimpatsu
https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20240129/p2a/00m/0na/019000c

PHOTO CAPTION: The plaintiffs, from left to right, Maurice, Zain Syed and Matthew participate in a press conference at the Tokyo District Court in Tokyo’s Chiyoda Ward on Jan. 29, 2024. (Mainichi/Jun Ida)

TOKYO — Three foreign-born residents of Japan filed suit at the Tokyo District Court on Jan. 29 against the Japanese state plus the Tokyo Metropolitan and Aichi Prefectural governments for what they claim is frequent police questioning based solely on their ethnicity, or racial profiling.

In addition to 3.3 million yen (about $22,000) each in compensation, the plaintiffs are demanding confirmation from the Tokyo and Aichi Prefectural governments that it is illegal for police officers to stop and question a person because of their race or nationality, and confirmation that the National Police Agency (NPA) is responsible for directing and making sure forces across Japan don’t engage in racial profiling. They allege that the police questioning violates Japanese constitutional guarantees of freedom from racial discrimination and respect for the individual, as well as Japanese law requiring probable cause for officers to stop and question someone.

Zain Syed, who came to Japan from Pakistan with his family when he was 8 and became a Japanese citizen at age 13, claims in the complaint that he has been questioned by police 15 times since moving to Nagoya as a teenager in 2016. In one incident in April 2023, he said that officers questioning him outside his home asked to see his foreign resident card, and searched his belongings when he informed them that he was a Japanese citizen. The officers allegedly never told Zain why he was being questioned.

“I understand it (police questioning) is extremely important for Japan’s public security,” Zain told a Jan. 29 press conference. However, his own frequent questioning made him suspect that people around him believed he might commit a crime because of his ‘foreign’ appearance. “I think there’s a very strong image that ‘foreigner’ equals ‘criminal,'” he said.

Fellow plaintiffs Maurice, a Black American, and Matthew, a South Pacific Islander of Indian descent, claim similar incidents of harassment when the officers involved did not give a clear legal reason for stopping them.

Maurice claims he has been questioned by police in public 16 or 17 times in the about 10 years he has lived in Japan. He told The Mainichi that it has “ramped up especially in the past five to six years.

“All I know is that if they (the police) stop me on the road and I don’t get a ticket, well, why did you stop me?” he said. And beyond the police, Maurice added that he is subjected to “extra questioning about what I’m doing” by regular people, including, “Are you overstaying your visa? Why are you here?”

Matthew states that police have questioned him at least 70 times since he arrived in Japan in 2002. In an incident in October 2021, Matthew said that officers who had pulled him and his Japanese wife over even stated that they had stopped the couple because “it’s rare to see a foreigner driving around here.” He added that he feels like he could be approached by police anywhere he goes in Tokyo, and multiple times, and that he now avoids going out.

Racial profiling, or the use of race, skin color, ethnicity, and other factors to suspect that someone is involved in crime, or target them for a police investigation, is a serious problem worldwide. In 2020, The United Nations’ Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination has recommended countries to formulate guidelines to prevent racial profiling.

In December 2021, the U.S. Embassy in Japan revealed on its Twitter account that it had “received reports of foreigners stopped and searched by Japanese police in suspected racial profiling incidents.” Japanese lawmakers demanded the NPA report on the situation, and in April 2022 the agency began examining complaints, inquiries, and other consultations with police forces across the country. In November 2022, the NPA announced that it found six cases of police officers questioning people inappropriately or without cause based on national and racial stereotypes in 2021.

Meanwhile, a Tokyo Bar Association survey of foreign residents and those with foreign roots carried out between January and February 2022 found that 62.9% of the 2,094 respondents claimed they had been questioned by police in the past five years. Of these, 85.4% said that officers approached them while acknowledging that they were someone with foreign roots based on “physical features” and other factors. And some 76.9% believed that there were no other factors than them being “a foreigner or someone with foreign roots” that prompted officers to approach them.

Plaintiffs’ attorney Motoki Taniguchi told the conference that, as the Japanese government tries to attract more foreign workers to combat the impact of its aging society and low birth rate, “society must be structured so that we can all live together with people with different roots.” He added that racial profiling by police has made “not a few people with foreign roots feel they’ve had enough, that they’re tired of Japan. Japan hasn’t formed the mindset yet that they (people with foreign roots) should be welcomed and treated as members of Japanese society.”

Police questioning “happens on the street, so naturally people who are around see this and may think that foreigners are up to no good. It reinforces a stigma. This completely contradicts the Japanese government’s policy of welcoming more foreigners to Japan.”

Zain noted that the number of people with foreign roots in Japanese society, including at schools, is rising, and will grow further as people stay long-term and have children here. “Compared to when I was a child, there are more people who, even if they look ‘foreign,’ they were born and raised in Japan and can only speak Japanese. I don’t want them to have the same experiences (with police) as I did, and I’d like to see a widening change of awareness across Japanese society,” he said.

(By Jun Ida and Robert Sakai-Irvine, The Mainichi staff writers) ENDS

My latest SNA VM column 52: “Positive Steps for Non-Japanese in Japan” (Jan 23, 2024), a report of a month spent in Tokyo and all the progress towards tolerance observed.

Posted on January 26, 2024January 26, 2024 by Debito Arudou, Ph.D.

mytest

Hi Blog. While I’m aware that the bigger news is the recent Miss Japan Carolina Shiino debate once again bringing to light Japan’s ethnostatist narratives, I’ll get to that in February’s SNA column. Meanwhile, here’s January’s column. Enjoy. Debito Arudou, Ph.D.

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POSITIVE STEPS FOR NON-JAPANESE IN JAPAN
By Debito Arudou. Shingetsu News Agency Visible Minorities column 52, January 23, 2024
Courtesy https://shingetsunewsagency.com/2024/01/23/visible-minorities-positive-steps-for-non-japanese/

Last month SNA (and this column) went on vacation for Christmas and New Years. During the hiatus, I spent a month in Tokyo meandering around visiting sights and people, developing my inner flaneur as well as conducting relaxed random research. Tokyo, a walking city riddled with world-class transportation and public facilities, is an ideal place for that.

I spent almost every afternoon or evening talking with long-term Japan residents from many walks of life. This included six academic researchers, two foreign correspondents, a media celebrity, a long-term resident vlogger, an employee of NHK, two secondary school teachers, a naturalized regional politician, a rural ryokan operator, a high-tech product salesman, a retired airbnb operator, a foreign exchange graduate student, and a labor union leader. All are specialists in their fields in terms of training and experience, most are Lifers in Japan, and all offered insightful analysis of current conditions in Japan. My research will probably inform future columns this year.

This month’s column will offer my impressions about how much Japan has changed regarding the issues that have always been on my radar screen — society’s openness to Newcomers. On that score, I have some positive developments to report:

RESIDENCY REQUIREMENTS HAVE EASED TOWARDS EQUALITY

One of my biggest qualms about Japan has been its two-tiered official registration system that openly excluded foreigners as residents. One is the Family Registry (koseki), which is required for all Japanese citizens, and continues to overlook foreigners as spouses of Japanese and parents of children. But the other, the Residency Certificate (juminhyo), has been revised in a good way.

To illustrate, consider what happened to a foreign friend. She was able to move to Japan on a researcher visa, go to the local ward office and place herself on a juminhyo, then have her Japanese husband come over later and place himself on her juminhyo. Even better, when asked who the Head of Household (setai nushi) was, the foreign wife stepped forward as the main breadwinner and claimed the spot.

This is significant. I can remember when bureaucrats refused tp accept women as household heads since they assumed the man must be the main income earner, adding sexism to the racism. None of this was possible before 2012, so finally Non-Japanese residents are getting equal official recognition as family members and breadwinners.

WHAT STILL NEEDS TO BE DONE

Despite being listed as “Residents” in official tallies, Japan’s official population tallies still do not include foreigners — listed as “the population of Japanese” (nihonjin no jinko) rather than “the population of Japan” (nihon no jinko). And of course, the Koseki System has to be reformed to list foreigners under the “spouse” column properly. Hardly likely anytime soon, but one can dream.

JAPAN’S GEARING UP FOR TOURISM

Japan has done it again — turned on a dime and accepted a new reality. Despite years of sweaty handwringing about how “Yokoso Japan” and Cool Japan” would ever deal with foreigners and all their pesky foreign languages (as seen in the dozens of hotels nationwide at the time that said they would refuse service to any foreigner), Japan has now risen to the challenge of catering to the influx of foreign folks and money (which in 2023 approached record levels again).

Multilingual signs, instructions, and apps are all over, as are multilingual staff in shops. Major foreign credit cards can now buy JR train tickets easily. One friend even noted that his neighboring hotel didn’t have his website in Japanese anymore, since he preferred Non-Japanese customers for their flexibility regarding his more spartan accommodations!

It’s been rewarding for Japan after three “lost decades” of economic doldrums. Between 1 and 2 percent of Japan’s annual GDP is now reliant on non-domestic tourism, and multilingual speakers face abundant opportunities in service sectors all over Japan. After brazen “Japanese Only” signs for decades, Japan simply can’t afford to treat foreign customers like shit anymore.

WHAT STILL NEEDS TO BE DONE

Japan (including those whiny foreign residents who think more foreigners somehow spoil their “pure Japan” experience) have to bellyache less about how things are getting too touristy — for tourism is what you wanted. Also, Japan’s government has to tame its impulses to blame foreigners for any ills, as was blatantly seen in the reflexive blanket ban on all foreigners (including Permanent Residents) during the Covid Pandemic. And of course, there’s nothing to stop any bigot from putting up a “Japanese Only” sign, as they still remain legal. Pass that anti-discrimination law, already!

FOREIGNERS ARE PRETTY NORMAL IN TOKYO

Perhaps it’s because my quarter-century in Japan was living in the sticks, but I’ve noticed just how comfortable I feel in Tokyo. In my month there engaging in some pretty intense negotiations, almost never did I get “Nihongo ga jozu”-ed, nor did anyone “weird out” as if speaking Japanese to me was like dealing with a talking dog. A near-majority of convenience stores had Non-Japanese staff, doing stuff any Japanese could do, and their speaking Japanese (even to me) was no big deal.

Tolerance for diversity and difference was quite palpable this trip. I rarely felt like I had to rehearse my dialog before negotiating — even talking extemporaneously resulted in working through any problem to a solution via trial and error. Even all the accented Japanese wasn’t an issue, unlike the bad old days where people would simply dismiss anything slightly abnormal with a blank stare. It just didn’t happen, at least in Tokyo.

WHAT STILL NEEDS TO BE DONE

This “can do” attitude needs to spread nationwide. A few quick trips outside Tokyo later showed me how old ways, including stares, “jozu-ing,” and “weirding out” at accents, are still a thing. Again, one can dream.

In sum, a trip back to Tokyo was delightful. In previous trips, I usually get triggered by something sooner or later and wind up reflexively “doing a Debito,” i.e., getting pushy and scoldy to get some respect from the intolerant and intransigent. This time around, however, even after more than a month, nothing really got under my skin.

Maybe I’ve mellowed. But I think Japan has changed quite a bit for the better too. I’ll offer some more thoughts and case studies in future columns this year.

ENDS

Happy 2024: Japan Times: “Japan should aim to maintain population of 80 million by 2100”, says private panel of business interests. 24 years later, no new ideas, since it calls for rises in birthrates, not immigration, yet again.

Posted on January 10, 2024January 11, 2024 by Debito Arudou, Ph.D.

mytest

Hi Blog. HNY and AkeOme. Last month was a year-end break for the Shingetsu News Agency and my Visible Minorities column, so let me open 2024 with yesterday’s JT article showing just how much things have not changed for the past quarter century. Article first, then my comment:

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Japan should aim to maintain population of 80 million by 2100: panel
The Japan Times. BY KAZUAKI NAGATA, STAFF WRITER, Jan 10, 2024
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2024/01/10/japan/society/population-proposal/

PHOTO CAPTION: Akio Mimura, honorary chairman of Nippon Steel and head of a private panel focused on depopulation, submits the group’s proposal to Prime Minister Fumio Kishida in Tokyo on Tuesday. | KYODO

(Ed: This actually made a pretty big domestic news splash. See all the headlines via Google here: 人口戦略会議. You can also see word about this even on the PM’s official website, but in the true spirit of government openness it only offers photo-ops with no way to actually read the proposal or see who’s on the panel.)

Amid concerns over rapid depopulation, a private panel has proposed that Japan should aim to have a stable population of 80 million by 2100 in order to maintain economic growth.

Last April, the government released an estimate that the population would be reduced by half to about 63 million in 2100, with 40% of people expected to be 65 or older.

Japan has wrestled with the issue of a declining birthrate for decades, but the situation is about to “change drastically,” with the country now entering a serious phase of population decline, the panel, headed by Nippon Steel honorary chairman Akio Mimura and consisting of 28 members including prominent academics and business leaders, said Tuesday.

The country’s population in 1930 was about 63 million, but the proportion of those 65 years or older was just 4.8% then, according to the panel, which submitted its proposal to Prime Minister Fumio Kishida the same day.

To avoid such a future, Japan needs to slow down the pace of the decline and eventually stop it, the panel said, adding that government strategy should focus on stabilizing the population at around 80 million by 2100. As of last month, Japan’s population was estimated to be 124 million.

The panel carried out several simulations and argued that if the country raised the total fertility rate — the average number of children a woman gives birth to in her lifetime — to 1.6 by around 2040, 1.8 by around 2050 and eventually 2.07 by 2060, it could maintain a population of around 80 million by 2100.

In 2022, Japan’s fertility rate fell for the seventh straight year to a record-tying low of 1.26. A rate of 2.07 is considered to be necessary to keep the population stable.

“This is not an easy task, but it is by no means impossible if full-scale efforts are launched to fight the declining birthrate,” the panel said, highlighting that it would take decades for such a strategy to start to bear fruit and that it was inevitable for the population to be smaller than it is today.

Still, if Japan can maintain a population of 80 million and also boost productivity, then the country would be able to see annual economic growth of about 0.9% from 2050 to 2100, according to the panel.

In tackling the issue, the government should establish a new committee of experts directly under the prime minister that would oversee the planning and implementation of the population strategy, the panel suggested.

The panel said one major problem was that the government and the private sector had failed to share sufficient information with the public about the gravity of rapid depopulation and the importance of preventing it.

“It is unfoundedly optimistic to say that ‘The population may be dwindling, but Japanese society will continue as before,’” the panel said.

Measures implemented by the government up until now to combat the declining birthrate may have produced some results, but they have been mostly “one-off and stopgap,” so they have not been enough to turn around the trend, the panel added.

Kishida has made tackling the country’s plummeting birthrate a top policy item and pledged to introduce “unprecedented steps” to head off the severe long-term economic impact. He has said that the government will raise the budget for child care-related policies over the next three years, with an extra ¥3.6 trillion ($24.8 billion) to be spent each year. ENDS

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COMMENT FROM DEBITO: There is nothing new under the sun when you have the same old people retreading the same old shinola to the same perpetually-elected party in power. Getting all these people together to wish for a skypie solution of increasing birthrates (while somehow also boosting productivity) is silly, as it has already been proposed multiple times over the decades without success. This is no way to craft public policy that actually solves a problem.

Indicatively, *once again* this report makes no mention of immigration, despite both the UN and then-PM Obuchi agreeing as far back as the *YEAR 2000* (see below) that immigration is inevitable to keep the economy going. But as we saw afterwards in 2009, xenophobic politics intervened, and even Japan’s demographers are forbidden to mention foreign inflows as part of Japan’s domestic demographic science. (See My JT column on that here.)

A further note: Whenever you have business interests involved (as if they’re any experts on demographic engineering), the primary concern will be about business interests, i.e., profits and cheap labor. Now remember what the likes of elite business lobby Keidanren wrought by bringing in foreign labor on exploitative revolving-door visa regimes since 1991 (the “Trainee” slave-labor program, for example). Allowing the grubby little hands of Japan’s business lobbies any more input into future policy drives only guarantees more inhumanity, because with population drops and an elderly society come labor shortages. Who will fill them? Robots; but robots don’t pay taxes into the rickety national pension system. So foreigners. Hence business interests will only continue to advocate importing labor without ever letting foreign workers become permanent Japanese residents.

In conclusion, a quarter-century later nothing has been learned. Just keep on saying the same old shinola and watch as Japan’s demographic juggernaut bankrupts the country. As long foreseen. Debito Arudou, Ph.D.

UPDATE: Members of the Jinkou Senryaku Kaigi, courtesy of JK. (Source is here, pg. 14)

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Excerpt from my book “Embedded Racism” (Second Edition 2022) on this subject, Chapter 10, including footnotes:

Figure 10.1 was data from the First Edition, which indicated Japan’s economy had, from the bursting of its economic “bubble” in 1993 through the year 2011, shrunk by nearly half a percent every year on average compared to its developed-country or regional brethren. As of this Second Edition, now incorporating 26 years of data from 1993 to 2019 (before the Covid Pandemic hit), Figure 10.2 shows that Japan is no longer in an average economic contraction, but its GDP per capita has grown on average by less than a percent per year, still easily underperforming most of the same select countries. (I surmise that Japan’s major growth industry, tourism to Japan, has significantly affected these numbers; as noted in Chapter Eight, tourism’s contribution to Japan’s total GDP has expanded from 1.7 to 2 percent since 2010. This underscores Japan’s need to avoid “Japanese Only” signs and rules.)

It is not clear that even these low growth rates are sustainable, given Japan’s perpetual demographic crisis. According to the most recent GOJ figures as this book went to press (June 30, 2021), Japan’s population continues to decrease, as its birthrate has long been below replacement levels, reaching the lowest on record in 2019 before being further worsened by the 2020 Covid Pandemic.[i] The number of (Japanese citizen—sic) children under age fifteen has dropped to record lows for 40 consecutive years, representing the lowest population percentage amongst major countries with populations of at least 40 million.[ii] Japan’s population has also been shrinking since 2011, and from the current level of 125.3 million (including the rising number of foreign residents), [iii] dropping by close to one million per year; at this rate it is projected to drop below 100 million by 2049.[iv]

Meanwhile, Japan’s working-age population is forecast to fall by nearly half from 81.7 million in 2010 to 44.2 million by 2060.[v] In terms of people above a “reasonable working age” of 65, the projected elderly but not yet infirm (ages 65-74) are projected to be at around 22% of Japan’s population; if you include all elderly and infirm (65 and up), this will comprise nearly 36% of Japan’s total population by 2050.[vi] Thus, with Japan’s demographic pyramid being top-heavy and projected to have one of the world’s highest median ages,[vii] the elderly and pensioners will soon outnumber young pension contributors, putting the solvency of Japan’s social security pension plans into jeopardy.[viii](Note that this is not unexpected: the GOJ and the UN both forecast this happening as early as the year 2000, when the UN advised Japan to immediately start bringing in more than a half million foreign residents per year.)[ix]

[i] “An uphill battle to reverse the falling birthrate.” Japan Times, June 4, 2020; “The COVID-19 Pandemic is Accelerating Japan’s Population Decline: A Statistical Analysis.” Nippon.com, May 25, 2021.

[ii] “Japan’s child population falls to record low 16.17 million.” Japan Times/Jiji Press, May 4, 2015; “Japan’s child population hits record low after 40 years of decline.” Kyodo News, May 4, 2021.

[iii] www.stat.go.jp/english/data/jinsui/tsuki/index.html.

[iv] “The COVID-19 Pandemic is Accelerating Japan’s Population Decline: A Statistical Analysis.” Nippon.com, May 25, 2021.

[v] “Japan Cabinet minister wary of opening ‘Pandora’s Box’ of immigration.” Japan Times, May 13, 2015; “Japan’s Population Falls for Ninth Straight Year.” Nippon.com, April 30, 2020.

[vi] “Kōreisha jinkō (65-74, 75 ijō) to sono wariai” [Population and proportion of elderly (65-74, 75+)]. Shūkan Ekonomisuto, January 15, 2008: 16.

[vii] “A declining Japan loses its once-hopeful champions.” Washington Post, October 27, 2012, particularly the graphic “As Japan’s population ages, optimism wanes.” More current statistics show that South Korea may overtake Japan in terms of highest median age by 2050, but Japan will still remain in second place. Seewww.statista.com/statistics/673014/top-ten-countries-with-highest-projected-median-age/ (accessed June 2, 2021).

[viii] One often-touted solution to the demographic crisis is automation, i.e., getting robots into fields that require elderly care, such as hospitals and care centers. See for example GOJ policy trial balloons floated at “Better than people: Why the Japanese want their robots to act more like humans.” Economist (London), December 20, 2005; “Government tackles population decline.” Yomiuri Shinbun, August 26, 2014, archived at www.debito.org/?p=12609; “Aging Japan: Robots may have role in future of elder care.” Reuters, March 27, 2018; et al. However, robots do not pay taxes, so without young people paying into pension plans for the current elderly, I do not see how automation will make up the financial shortfall when the young taxpayers reach retirement.

[ix] Arudou 2006c, which notes, “As far back as 2000, under the Obuchi Administration, ‘The Prime Minister’s Commission on Japan’s Goals in the 21st Century’ (as well as the UN) famously advised Japan to import around 600,000 people per annum. This would maintain Japan’s tax base and ameliorate the effects of record-high longevities and record-low birthrates contributing to an aging population.” [Emphasis added.]

“EMBEDDED RACISM” EXCERPT ENDS

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Here’s one domestic news article not behind paywall on this:

人口「８０００万人」維持を、２１００年に向けて戦略会議が提言…「安定的で成長力のある国家」

読売新聞　2024/01/09 17:28

https://www.yomiuri.co.jp/politics/20240109-OYT1T50194/

　民間有識者らで作る「人口戦略会議」（議長＝三村明夫・日本製鉄名誉会長）は９日、人口減少を食い止めるための提言「人口ビジョン２１００」を発表した。２１００年の日本の目指すべき姿として、「安定的で、成長力のある８０００万人国家」を掲げた。

新成人は過去最少の１０６万人…２００５年生まれ、前年より６万人減

　日本の総人口は０８年の１億２８０８万人をピークに急速な減少傾向にあり、国立社会保障・人口問題研究所の長期推計では、２１００年には約６３００万人に半減すると予測されている。

　提言では、人口減に歯止めがかからない場合、「どのような重大な事態が起きるか正確に理解することが重要」として、「超高齢化や地方消滅で（社会の）進歩が止まる」と深刻さを強調。２１００年の人口を８０００万人で安定させる「定常化戦略」と、小さい人口規模でも多様性と成長力を確保する「強靱きょうじん化戦略」の一体的な推進を訴えた。

　定常化戦略は、人口が維持できる合計特殊出生率２・０７を達成する時期を６０年に設定し、具体策に〈１〉若者の雇用改善〈２〉女性の就労促進〈３〉総合的な子育て支援制度の構築――などを挙げた。強靱化戦略では、生産性の低い産業の改革や人への投資の強化が重要だとした。

　これらの戦略を進める体制として、内閣への「人口戦略推進本部（仮称）」設置のほか、勧告権を持つ首相直属の強力な審議会、各界各層に議論を呼びかける国民会議の創設を提起。国会に常設組織を設けて超党派の合意を目指すよう要請した。

　岸田首相は９日、首相官邸で三村氏らから提言を受け取り、「官民で連携して社会の意識改革に取り組んでいきたい」と述べた。三村氏は東京都内で記者会見し、「現役世代には次の世代の未来に対する責任がある」として、社会全体での意識共有を求めた。

　人口戦略会議は昨年７月に発足し、元総務相の増田寛也・日本郵政社長や人口問題担当の山崎史郎・内閣官房参与らが参加している。提言は１０日発売の「中央公論」２月号に掲載される。ENDS

Japan Times: “Fukuoka court rules ban on dual nationality is constitutional”. Debito.org makes the case for why banning dual nationality is unrealistic, not to mention just plain stupid, with an excerpt from my book “Embedded Racism”.

Posted on December 21, 2023December 21, 2023 by Debito Arudou, Ph.D.

mytest

Hi Blog. First this article, then a comment:

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Fukuoka court rules ban on dual nationality is constitutional
Yuri Kondo (center), the plaintiff of a dual nationality case, speaks during a news conference Wednesday in the city of Fukuoka after the Fukuoka District Court handed down a ruling on her case.
BY ANIKA OSAKI EXUM, The Japan Times, Dec 6, 2023
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2023/12/06/japan/crime-legal/dual-nationality-fukuoka-ruling/
Courtesy of lots of people, including Dave Spector
Discussion already underway on Debito.org in an earlier blog post Comments section here.

FUKUOKA – The Fukuoka District Court ruled Wednesday that Japan’s law that bans dual nationality is constitutional, rejecting an argument by a Japan-born plaintiff who lost her Japanese citizenship after she naturalized as an American.

Yuri Kondo, 76, had argued that the nationality law — which stipulates that Japanese nationals will lose their citizenship if they become a citizen of a foreign country — undermines fundamental human rights to pursue happiness, self-determination, and identity, as guaranteed under the Constitution.

While the nationality law was deemed constitutional, presiding Judge Fumitaka Hayashi said the wish of the individual who would lose their nationality should be considered as it is part of a person’s identity.

Hayashi also touched on the fact that since the nationality law was last revised in 1984, the number of countries allowing dual nationality has increased from one-third to three-quarters worldwide, reflecting a change in global attitudes.

“It is worth considering allowing individuals to remain dual nationals and giving them a certain period of time to choose a nationality, as proposed by the plaintiffs,” said Hayashi.

Born and raised in Japan, Kondo spent nearly four decades working and raising a family in the United States. She became a U.S. citizen in 2004.

After traveling back and forth between her home countries with both nationalities for years, she was flagged as being a dual citizen in 2017 — first at a passport office in Tokyo, where her passport was confiscated and her application rejected, and then by airport immigration officials when they realized she was exiting Japan with an American passport that had no entrance stamp.

Today, Kondo only has an American passport. She hasn’t reapplied to renew her Japanese one, fearing it would be denied again. However, she still retains her Japanese family registry and she also hasn’t received any follow-ups from the government asking her to formally withdraw one of her nationalities.

Kondo returned in 2020 at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic and has remained in Fukuoka ever since. She feared she might not be able to return to Japan if she left and now fears that she’ll face punishment for overstaying while her citizenship status remains in limbo.

During her time as a lawyer in the U.S., Kondo was consulted by many Japanese people living overseas facing similar situations. So, in hopes of advocating not only for herself but for many others too, she filed the lawsuit in 2022 questioning the constitutionality of the nationality law, its lack of procedure and the harm it’s caused to people who have Japanese roots.

After hearing the Fukuoka court’s ruling Wednesday, Kondo admitted she felt a bit deflated.

“In a way, I thought ‘Again?’” she said, referencing a recent ruling by the Supreme Court upholding the dismissal of another dual nationality case filed in Tokyo.

Kondo questioned the part of the ruling where it was stated that Japan permits the opportunity to choose a nationality. Many people — including those from whom she receives emails for consultation — are unaware that choosing another citizenship means they will automatically lose their Japanese citizenship, as in her case, she said.

Japanese law prohibits citizens from having more than one nationality after the age of 20. But when it comes to the requirements and enforcement surrounding those rules, the process is murky at best.

In September, the Supreme Court dismissed an appeal on a separate dual nationality case, involving eight plaintiffs currently living in Europe, which questioned the law’s constitutionality.

The Supreme Court rejected the basis of the appeal, upholding the original district court dismissal of the case that stated the law works to prevent “friction” that could arise from having dual nationality. The lower court ruling also noted that Japan still allows the freedom to change nationality.

Lawyers, some of whom are also working on Kondo’s case, said that the Supreme Court’s dismissal didn’t include a sufficient rationale behind the decision and requested a retrial.

With the Fukuoka court ruling though, Kondo’s lawyers felt there was significant progress in the court’s choice of words, as it mentioned the significance of Japanese nationality being the basis of one’s human rights and identity.

“For the first time, (the ruling) clearly stated that an individual’s intention must be respected to the fullest extent possible if they were to lose their citizenship,” lawyer Teruo Naka said. “I believe this is tremendously significant and this verdict signals significant progress in certain areas.”

There are currently multiple ongoing lawsuits against the government concerning Japan’s dual nationality law. Other cases include one filed in Tokyo that involves a child who was stripped of Japanese citizenship after the child’s parents applied for the child’s British passport, and another in Kyoto by a Japanese person who obtained Canadian citizenship. ENDS
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COMMENT FROM DEBITO: Most arguments made by the Japanese Government dovetail around the idea that people will be somehow confused in terms of national allegiances if they have more than one nationality. For what if Japan went to war with the country you have a second passport for? Where would your allegiances lie?

Crafting public policy merely on the basis of hypotheticals is not the best way to make laws. As noted above in the article, the number of countries allowing dual nationality is in fact increasing (“the number of countries allowing dual nationality has increased from one-third to three-quarters worldwide“), as more people around the world travel, resettle, immigrate, marry, and have multinational children as well as lives. Forcing them to give up their other nationality is to force them to give up part of their identity — a completely unnecessary and moreover psychologically damaging move just for the sake of bureaucratic convenience. And that’s before we get into issues of arbitrary enforceability, as discussed below.

The increase in diversity should be reflected in laws to accommodate reality. Instead, we have pig-headed J politicians who can’t imagine a life beyond their own experiences (with the exception of the LDP’s Kouno Taro, who actually argued for dual nationality, albeit to coat the Kokutai in more glory, not for the sake of the individual’s identity) and refuse to legislate reality into reality. And that feeds into a hidebound judiciary that claim they can only enforce the law as it’s written (even presiding Judge Hayashi above expressed regret at that).

To finish up, let me excerpt from my book “Embedded Racism” on this topic. It’ll make the case about why public policy is as stupid as it is as best I can. Debito Arudou, Ph.D.

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

From Arudou, Debito, “Embedded Racism: Japan’s Visible Minorities and Racial Discrimination” (Lexington Books, 2nd Edition, pp 117-122, plus footnotes)

Legal Renunciation/Revocation of Japanese Citizenship and Wajin Privilege

Japan’s Nationality Law also allows for renunciation and unilateral revocation of citizenship, which may happen, for example, because dual nationality is not permitted. According to Articles 14 through 16, if a child has two nationalities, the child must have surrendered one of them with written proof to the Ministry of Justice by age 22). If not done promptly and correctly, the Law states that criminal penalties, including revocation of Japanese citizenship, can apply. Also, according to the Law, kokumin who take out (or choose) another citizenship must also declare it to the Government of Japan (GOJ) and renounce Japanese citizenship.[i]

However, people who can claim blood ties to Japan’s Wajin majority enjoy significant privilege under the Nationality Law. Notwithstanding the entitlement-by-blood privileges that are the definition of a jus sanguinis system, Nikkei persons of Japanese descent get a faster track for obtaining nationality (Article 6), and even former citizens get special Wajin privileges after renunciation (Article 17, neither of which happen, for example, under United States’ nationality laws).[ii] Moreover, Wajin children of international marriages often keep dual nationality beyond the age of 22 due to unenforced regulations.[iii]

That said, the GOJ has been given more latitude in recent years to put Japan’s international children on legal tenterhooks: In 2015, the Supreme Court creatively interpreted Article 12 to allow the unilateral revocation of Japanese citizenship for clerical errors in cases where Japanese children were born overseas; and in 2021, a lower court ruled that citizens discovered with dual passports beyond the age of 22 can be stripped of their Japanese nationality at the GOJ’s discretion.[iv] Naturally, this incentivizes adults with international backgrounds to suppress their diversity in favor of Japan’s pure-blooded monoethnic narrative.[v]

An Example of Wajin Privilege and Politics under the Nationality Law: The Alberto and Aritomi Fujimori Cases

An instructive case of Wajin privilege under the Nationality Law is that of former Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori,[vi] born in Peru to two Japan-born émigré Wajin parents. Fujimori was reportedly a dual citizen of Japan and Peru due to his parents registering him in Kumamoto from within Peru as a child (more on Japan’s registry systems below). In 2000, after a decade in office laden with allegations of corruption and human rights abuses,[vii] Fujimori infamously resigned his presidency via a Tōkyō hotel room fax and declared himself a Japanese citizen. Despite holding public office overseas, in contravention of Nationality Law Article 16.2, Fujimori received a Japanese passport weeks later (when most applications can take a year or two to process).[viii] Then, despite international arrest warrants, Fujimori was not extradited, and enjoyed a comfortable lifestyle with his fellow naturalized brother-in-law Aritomi[ix] in Tōkyō’s high society until 2005.[x] Although the media assigned cause to political connections, e.g., “favorit[ism] among conservative politicians… enamored with the idea of a man with Japanese ancestry reaching political heights abroad,”[xi] Fujimori’s case is nevertheless one of privilege.[xii] This is in contrast to scenarios under Japan’s nationality regime where even half-Wajin children caught in bureaucratic registration dilemmas (such as being born of one North Korean parent)[xiii]have been rendered stateless due to geopolitical conceits, with legal protections of no country.

Supreme Court 2008 Interpretation of the Nationality Law: Human Rights in Japan Predicated upon having Japanese Citizenship

Other recent developments have made clear that human and civil rights in Japan are connected to having Japanese citizenship. Japan’s Supreme Court, in a landmark decision in June 2008, declared unconstitutional a clause in Article 3 requiring acknowledgment of Wajin paternity through marriage. That is to say, enforcement of the Nationality Law could no longer deny Japanese nationality to a child of a non-citizen woman and a Wajin man who had been born out of wedlock (or else had not been properly registered before birth). The Supreme Court’s express legal reasoning behind declaring this situation unconstitutional was, inter alia, that a lack of Japanese nationality is the cause of discrimination, and that obtaining Japanese nationality is essential for basic human rights to be guaranteed in Japan.[xiv] This systematic linkage between rights and citizenship has also been reaffirmed in pinpoint examples, such as the GOJ’s biased Prime Ministerial Cabinet surveys of human rights in Japan;[xv] and, famously, a police prosecutor in Saga Prefecture bravely admitted in 2011, “We were taught that… foreigners have no human rights” when under police detention and interrogation.[xvi]

At this juncture, it is important to emphasize the embedded discourse behind the Supreme Court’s legal reasoning here: Human rights in Japan are not linked to being human; they are linked to holding Japanese citizenship.[xvii] That is the crux of this research. That means the process of granting, restricting, or denying citizenship to select people is the gatekeeping mechanism any nation-state has over the enforcement of civil and political rights and privileges. However, as will be described below, the systemic granting of special privileges to people with Wajin blood ties also embeds a racialized framework behind equal protection under the law. It is the essential ideology justifying a structurally unequal treatment of non-kokumin at all other levels of society.

Japan’s Nationality Law from an International Comparative Perspective: Becoming An Outlier

Although the gatekeeping mechanism of naturalization is available to any nation-state through its citizenship laws, Kashiwazaki (2000) offers a comparative perspective of structural inequality in Japan’s citizenship rules:

In the 1980s and 1990s, laws regulating nationality and citizenship were revised in immigrant-receiving countries such as Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Switzerland, where nationality transmission was mainly based on jus sanguinis (by parentage). These revisions eased criteria for acquiring nationality by first-generation, long-term resident aliens as well as by the second and subsequent generations. Major types of legal administrative changes include introduction or expansion of the as-of-right acquisition of citizenship [i.e., Japan has no “as-of-right acquisition” system; anyone who was not attributed Japanese citizenship by birth must go through the process of naturalization]; double jus soli, by which the third generation obtains citizenship automatically; and toleration for dual nationality… [On the other hand], there is no unified, coherent policy that could be called the Japanese citizenship policy (436-7).

Kashiwazaki also cites five characteristics of how Japan is distinctive in restricting access to citizenship: 1) Jus sanguinisonly for nationality transmission, with no concession made for former “Commonwealth”-style colonial historical ties, 2) tight border control, 3) strict naturalization rules that only go through the Ministry of Justice, 4) a close relationship between nationality and family registry, and 5) restrictive access to Permanent Residency status (437-47).

Now that we have established the barriers to becoming a kokumin, let us proceed to the second hurdle for national membership as a national: how kokumin are officially registered as citizens, and, conversely, how non-citizens have been officially excluded as residents of Japan.

FOOTNOTES

[i] Independent researcher and translator William Wetherall disputes this research’s interpretation of “renunciation” on his website (www.wetherall.sakura.ne.jp/yoshabunko///nationality/Dual_nationality.html), writing as of 2017 that the converse, dual nationality, is “not forbidden, unpreventable, and tacitly permitted,” because the GOJ works under a “pragmatic recognition of its inability to force Japanese nationals to renounce other nationalities.” He disputes the GOJ’s power of revocation under the Nationality Law between the semantics of “abandoning” (hōki) versus “revoking” (ridatsu) versus “choosing” (sentaku) Japanese nationality. In other words, in Wetherall’s reading, as far as the GOJ is concerned, the only issue is the “choice” or “revocation” of Japanese nationality, not the “revocation” or “abandonment” of foreign nationalities, so the GOJ has no power to force dual nationals to “abandon” foreign and “choose” Japanese.

That said, the Nationality Law nevertheless officially demands the “choice” of Japanese nationality only, and does not allow citizens to “choose” other nationalities without (in principle) “losing” (sōshitsu) Japanese nationality. Parts of this law are backed up by criminal penalties for noncompliance (Article 20), direct permissions and punishment by the Minister of Justice (e.g., Article 16), and recent court decisions mentioned in this chapter further empowering the GOJ’s ability to punish dual citizenship holders. My read is that whether or not the GOJ chooses to enforce the Nationality Law remains at their discretion; as we shall see below in this chapter, Japan’s administrative branch has great extralegal power to “clarify” laws through ministerial directive (see also Asakawa ibid). This enables bureaucrats, acting on behalf of the Minister of Justice, to activate or strengthen formerly dormant sections of the law given the exigencies of current political policy.

[ii] United States Department of State, personal communications, January and March 2011.

[iii] Furthermore, under Nationality Law Article 2.3, babies born in Japan whose nationality is unknown, or whose parents are unknown, are by default Japanese nationals (which leads to a conundrum when Non-Wajin babies are left in hospital “baby hatches” for abandoned children; incidentally, this loophole is the only way Japanese citizenship may be acquired by jus soli. See “Foreign baby left at ‘baby hatch’.” Kyodo News, September 8, 2008; “Akachan pōsto ni gaikokujin no kodomo: Kumamoto-shi no Jikei Byōin.” [Foreign baby left in “baby hatch” at Kumamoto clinic], 47News.jp, September 8, 2008. Vaguely, the media determined the “foreignness” of the baby as due to the unknown parents reportedly being Zainichi. More at www.debito.org/?p=1900.

[iv] “Top court backs repeal of Japanese nationality due to parents’ lapse abroad.” Asahi Shinbun, March 11, 2015, at www.debito.org/?p=13144; “Court rules in favor of Japan’s ban on dual nationality.” Mainichi Shinbun, January 21, 2021, at www.debito.org/?p=16393.

[v] “Dual citizenship in Japan: A ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy leaves many in the dark.” Japan Times, feature undated, mid-2018.

[vi] Sources for this section include: “Ex-President Fujimori should face Justice.” Japan Today, July 16, 2001; “Fujimori dismisses Interpol notice.” Japan Times/Associated Press, March 30, 2003; “Fujimori gets Peru passport, eyes return.” Japan Times, September 15, 2005; “Japan ‘uncooperative’ in Fujimori probe.” Kyodo News, November 19, 2005; “Fujimori tied to $300,000 in ‘hidden’ bank account.” Kyodo News, November 30, 2005; “Ending Impunity: Pinochet’s involuntary legacy.” The Economist, December 13, 2006; “Ex-Peruvian President Fujimori asked to run in Japan elections.” Mainichi Daily News, June 19, 2007; “Editorial: Fujimori’s Candidacy.” Asahi Shinbun, July 12, 2007; “Diet seat eludes absentee Fujimori.” Kyodo News, July 31, 2007; “Fujimori returns to Peru to face trial.” Associated Press, September 23, 2007; “Fujimori convicted.” Associated Press, December 11, 2007; “Peru’s Fujimori gets 25 years for death squad.” Associated Press, April 8, 2009; Debito Arudou, “Fujimori gets his; Japan left shamed.” Japan Times, May 5, 2009.

[vii] See for example “Mass sterilisation scandal shocks Peru.” BBC News, July 24, 2002; et al.

[viii] The GOJ expedited the process by claiming the “Master Nationality Rule”, an interpretation of Article 4 of 1930’s League of Nations Convention on Certain Questions Relating to the Conflict of Nationality Laws, where a state has the option to recognize a dual national as a sole national if it so chooses, as long as the person in question has the nationality of that state. The Japanese government chose to recognize only Fujimori’s “Japanese nationality,” based upon childhood family registration in Kumamoto from abroad, which is also in contravention of Japan’s Nationality Law. The GOJ also claimed that under the 1985 revision of the Nationality Law, which permitted citizenship to pass through the Japanese mother’s blood as well as the father’s, that children with multiple nationalities had until the end of 1986 to declare or forfeit Japanese nationality; those who declared nothing would be assumed to have retained Japanese nationality and forfeited all others. Since Fujimori had not declared either way, he was reportedly grandfathered in. See “The many faces of citizenship.” Japan Times, January 1, 2009. See also Anderson & Okuda (2003: 334-289). They conclude that Fujimori’s Japanese citizenship was legally binding, as he had never notified the Japanese government of his intent to give it up, and the Japanese government had declined to notify him that he had lost it.

[ix] Anderson & Okuda (2003: 310-8); see also “Fugitive Fujimori relative is shielded by Japan,” New York Times, July 19, 2001, regarding the case of Fujimori’s brother-in-law, and former Peruvian Ambassador to Japan, Victor Aritomi Shinto’s expedited naturalization into Japan. Although Anderson & Okuda conclude that Fujimori’s Japanese citizenship was not necessarily a politically-motivated move (albeit one of government “discretion” not to a priori notify Fujimori of his lost citizenship), since he legally retained it by not giving it up, the authors also conclude that Aritomi’s example was of dubious legal standing, since it was a naturalization procedure (not a latent holding of Japanese citizenship). Moreover, a) it took only six months, much less time than average, and b) it was awarded despite an outstanding international arrest warrant, in violation of the Nationality Law’s abovementioned requirement for “upright conduct.”

[x] See for example “Author Sono calls for racial segregation in op-ed piece.” Japan Times, February 12, 2015, which mentions Sono opening her home to Fujimori. There is an even more curious epilogue to the Fujimori Case. Reportedly bored with his Tōkyō lifestyle (Sims, ibid), Fujimori renewed his Peruvian passport and flew to Chile in 2005 to stand for election in absentia in Peru, whereupon he was immediately put under arrest pending extradition. He lost the Peruvian election, but was able to run for election in Japan in absentia in 2007 (where he lost again). Then Chile extradited Fujimori to Peru, where he was ultimately sentenced to prison in 2009 for 29 years for human rights violations, including abuses of power, murder, and kidnapping. After being pardoned by the President of Peru in 2017, Peru’s Supreme Court reversed the pardon and put Fujimori back in prison in 2019.

[xi] Ibid, Associated Press, March 30, 2003.

[xii] This is not the only case of an alleged criminal facing extradition for criminal charges overseas taking refuge in Japan’s naturalization processes. Delfo Zorzi, aka Hagen Roi, despite accusations of neo-fascist terrorism and mass murder by the Italian judiciary for allegedly taking part in a massacre in Milan in 1969, was also granted Japanese citizenship even though government officials had been aware for years that he was a convicted criminal under extradition proceedings. The GOJ refused extradition, and Zorzi currently directs an import-export business in Aoyama, Tōkyō. See“Zorzi got citizenship despite criminal past”, Mainichi Daily News, June 2, 2000.

[xiii] “24 defectors from DPRK still stateless: Prejudice rife in Catch-22 situation”, Yomiuri Shinbun, June 13, 2007.

[xiv] “Top court says marriage requirement for nationality unconstitutional,” Kyodo News, June 4, 2008. See alsoIwasawa (1998: 303), and Bryant (1991-2). Bryant’s discussion of how the very definition of “Japanese citizenship” (official koseki family registration) creates discrimination towards children born out of wedlock or insufficiently registered is particularly informative.

[xv] More on this below, but the abovementioned Bureau of Human Rights survey asked leading questions casting doubt on foreigners’ grounds to have human rights, and consequently got responses indicating that a majority of the Japanese public “does not believe that foreigners should have the same human-rights protections as Japanese.” See “Human rights survey stinks: Government effort riddled with bias, bad science.” Japan Times, October 23, 2007.

[xvi] Debito Arudou, “For the sake of Japan’s future, foreigners deserve a fair shake”, Japan Times, December 6, 2011; Colin P.A. Jones, “Schizophrenic Constitution leaves foreigners’ rights mired in confusion”, Japan Times, November 1, 2011; “‘Yakuza to gaikokujin ni jinken wa nai to oshierareta’, moto kenji ga bakuro shita odoroku beki ‘shinjin kyōiku’ no jittai” [“We were taught that foreigners have no rights”: A former prosecutor confesses how new entrants are educated in surprising ways], Niconico News, May 23, 2011.

[xvii] Dōshisha Law School Professor Colin P.A. Jones (ibid) concurs: “[T]he Japanese Constitution speaks of defining equality and ‘fundamental human rights’ as being conditioned on nationality rather than being human.”

My SNA VM column 51: “Being thankful despite adversity” (Nov 27, 2023), a think piece on how people survive terrible lives because the basic unit of survival is being part of a pair. And if you’re not in one in Japan, life is especially difficult.

Posted on November 27, 2023November 27, 2023 by Debito Arudou, Ph.D.

mytest

SNA VM 51 BEING THANKFUL DESPITE ADVERSITY
Subtitle: We all know life can be tough, especially for people in Japan. But practicing being thankful, particularly if you can find someone to thank, isn’t just a matter of good fortune. Psychologically, the basic unit of survival is being part of a pair.

By Debito Arudou, Shingetsu News Agency Visible Minorities Column 51, Nov 27, 2023
https://shingetsunewsagency.com/2023/11/27/visible-minorities-being-thankful-despite-adversity/

Last week heralded American Thanksgiving, and with it some life lessons.

While I’m wary of transposing an American holiday on SNA’s overseas audience, I think any excuse to be reflective and thankful for what you have — and grateful for avoiding what ill could have befallen you — is a valuable life skill.

As they say, any excuse is a good one for a party, so likewise any excuse is good to be thankful. That means any day can be for thanksgiving. I choose today.

Life is full of big emotions, many of them caused by you, others the product of your being in the wrong place at the wrong time, and some are just the cards you were dealt from birth and environment.

We can put that down to bad luck or some godforsaken ordeal. Or we can rationalize about things that don’t kill you making you stronger, adversity building character, etc.

But I don’t believe in ordeals anymore. I’m 58. My character is pretty much built. Moreover I’ve seen, through elders turned bitter in their old age, that too much adversity just makes you mean.

So as I approach my sixties, one of my life projects is understanding the science and practice of happiness. Interim conclusion: I choose to be happy. To me that means being thankful for the people who carry you through the inevitable tribulations of life while you do the same for them.

The life hack is having another person — at least one — who wishes you well, has your best interests in mind, and is there to see what you see, reminding you that you’re not the only one going through all this.

There is some science here. A book called “Escape from Camp 14” describes a survivor’s account of escaping a North Korean concentration camp. It offered the following life lesson:

The protagonist at first accepted his harsh life in North Korea as his lot in society, even as he ended up interned for reasons beyond his control. But he didn’t seriously contemplate escape until a fellow prisoner said he would do it with him. Somebody else confirmed he wasn’t crazy for wanting out.

As “Escape from Camp 14” notes on page 84, “Their relationship echoed, in many ways, the bonds of trust and mutual protection that kept prisoners alive and sane in Nazi concentration camps. In those camps, researchers found, the ‘basic unit of survival’ was the pair, not the individual. (Emphasis mine.)

“‘It was in the pairs that the prisoners kept alive the semblance of humanity,’ concluded Elmer Luchterhand, a sociologist at Yale who interviewed fifty two concentration camp survivors shortly after liberation. Pairs stole food and clothing, exchanged small gifts and planned for the future. If one member of a pair fainted from hunger in front of an SS officer, the other would prop him up. […] Finally, the death of one member of a pair often doomed the other,” noting that Anne Frank, for example, “lost the will to live after the death of her sister.”

This example is obviously extreme, but it is instructive. It’s hard to imagine a greater sense of isolation than an entire state apparatus designed to destroy you.

Or in Japan’s case, consider a society designed to perpetually alienate you, say your thoughts and feelings are deviant or inapplicable, or remind you don’t belong here no matter what you do. Some accept it as their lot as a foreigner. Others leave for more accepting societies. But for those who stay in a polity predicated on finely tuned embedded racism, people do survive. The key is finding somebody to go through with it as a pair.

(You may of course argue that solitude in a secret world will also do. Plenty of Japanese malcontents and dropouts do exactly this. Known as the hikikomori, I don’t think they are a healthy model.)

That’s why I’m thankful for my life partner now. I had one before while in Japan. But Japanese society has a habit of driving couples apart through divisive role play.

The idealized family is where one person spends his waking moments absent from home making the money (the so-called “salary delivery vehicle”, or kyūryō unpansha), while the other devotes her life to running the home and raising a family (ryōsai kenbo). It doesn’t matter that your personality might not be into kids, into being a corporate drone, or into conspicuous consumption as a lifestyle. Even as Japan modernizes and diversifies, these slow-drip pressures over decades are palpable and unyielding.

I’ve been through a divorce in Japan and understand why it happened. When you realize that cultural and media tropes are steadily morphing your erstwhile partner into a stranger, and all the basic values you thought you shared (such as childrearing values, saving and spending habits, personal space and housekeeping, openness to new experiences, leisure activities and holiday celebrations, even physical intimacy into old age) turned out to be faux or fleeting, that’s very isolating.

At first you accept it as your lot. Until you realize just how unhappy you’ve become.

This can of course happen in any society. But given the high separation and divorce rates amongst my long-term friends in Japan (who, given Japan’s lack of psychological counseling for couples, were generally encouraged to seek solace elsewhere), I can’t but help feel that there’s a culturally based pathology at work.

There definitely is one when you want out. That’s when you get into how Japan’s divorce system deliberately forces contestations into acrimonious negotiations, killing parent-child relationships in the process. Your life partner has suddenly become your worst enemy who can legally steal the kids.

Some never escape this prison, stuck in a “separation under the same roof” (kateinai bekkyo) where they live together but never interact. Others succeed in getting out, but I’ve seen many survivors of Japanese divorces languish for years alone wondering what it was all for. They drift off into the mental illness of never trusting partners again: Once bitten, twice shy.

The ones who fully recover find friends — or better yet a new life partner — who tell them they were not nuts. Forged in the furnace of similar adversities, they create a constructive pair of individuals with fully formed characters. They escape from isolation with someone who actively cultivates the relationship: nurtures instead of blames, consults instead of shuns, understands instead of indulges, actively listens instead of merely dismissing as foreign.

If that means you escape an intolerant society together through relocation, so be it. You must prioritize getting into an environment that makes the two of you happy. Otherwise you just might spend your twilight years resentful, bitter and mean.

Not for me. I choose to exercise happiness, thankful for other people’s help — and for my current life partner in specific. May you find yours.

ENDS

My SNA Visible Minorities Column 50, “Memory-holing the ‘Japanese Only’ signs” (Oct 31, 2023), where I conclude that, since racial discrimination is unconstitutional but not illegal in Japan, the most effective way to get “Japanese Only” signs down is to get the media and government involved. If they won’t help, you’re probably out of luck.

Posted on October 30, 2023October 30, 2023 by Debito Arudou, Ph.D.

mytest

Memory-holing the “Japanese Only” signs

Exclusionary businesses have a long history in Japan, and people seem to be forgetting it. Here’s a reminder from somebody who has studied them more than anybody.

By Debito Arudou. Shingetsu News Agency VM 50, October 31, 2023

News Item: The Okinawa Times reported that an izakaya pub in Naha put up a sign saying, in a mix of English and Japanese, “Because our staff can only speak Japanese, Japanese Only (sorry). We don’t allow customers from overseas to enter our bar.” Once it made the news, the local government tourist agency intervened, and after some weeks and back and forth, the bar took the sign down.

For this, my 50th column for SNA, I’d like to take the reader on a little nostalgia trip through a project I’ve been working on for a quarter century: “Japanese Only” signs.

I’ve investigated and interviewed hundreds of these exclusionary places, published and updated seven books on this issue in English and Japanese, and curated on Debito.org the “Rogues’ Gallery of Exclusionary Establishments” since 1999 to make sure this issue doesn’t get memory-holed.

For it seems that memory-holing is happening. A SoraNews24 article on the Naha Case didn’t do much research, claiming somehow that, “Bars with Japanese-customers-only policies aren’t unheard of in Japan, but they’re becoming increasingly uncommon in the modern age. Moreover, when you do come across such establishments, they’re generally dedicated bars.” (Incorrect. The highest incidents of exclusionary rules are in fact hotels.)

Then we get to the public reaction to the news. When I put it up on Debito.org, some readers were defensive as usual, basically ranging from the “self-othering” by the Guestists (quote: “I understand why they do it. I’m not offended. It’s their business and country.”) to the Ostriches who prefer, in spite of decades of evidence to the contrary, to bury their head in the sand and pretend the problem simply doesn’t exist (quote: “You are overdramatizing things. It doesn’t say we do not allow foreigners. Being to those places as long as you speak Japanese you can enter anywhere. You have to see things from their perspective too you know. They don’t wanna get in trouble because a tourist doesn’t read nor understand. As simple as that.”)

But it’s not as simple as that. “Japanese Only” signs in fact predate the massive tourist influx to Japan over the past decade and thus cannot be blamed on them. Yes, signs have popped up here and there since foreigners were allowed back in after the pandemic, but the earliest signs I’ve been able to verify started in 1992, when public baths in the city of Kofu put up signs refusing foreigners — particularly foreign women imported during the Bubble Era to work as bar hostesses and in the sex trades — due to the contemporary fear of AIDS (which of course was linked to foreigners). Fortunately, once the Kofu Case hit national news, the city health department intervened, demanded the bathhouses cease excluding, and educated the public about how AIDS is actually transmitted (i.e., not through shared bathwater or bathhouse).

But then it bubbled up again in Otaru, a seaport in Hokkaido, when in 1993 “Japanese Only” signs went up in a couple of public baths ostensibly to bar Russian sailors shipping in seafood from former Soviet waters. However this time local media and government ignored the situation, because they knew the locals have a “thing” about about Russians.

After WWII, many Japanese who lived in wartime-occupied Sakhalin and the Kuriles were forcibly repatriated by international agreements, and most emigrated to Hokkaido in general and Otaru in specific. Memories are long in a defeated people, so they ate the Russians’ seafood but drew the line at “smelly, scary, and drunk Russkies” (their words) sharing their public baths. And up stayed the exclusionary signs for years.

How on earth can this happen? Because in Japan, “Japanese Only” rules are unconstitutional but not illegal.

Unconstitutional because discrimination by race is explicitly barred under the Constitution of Japan (Article 14). Not illegal because Japan is the only developed democratic country without any law in its civil or criminal code specifically banning racial discrimination (jinshu sabetsu).

And it shows. Compare what would happen if a business open to the public put up a “no foreigners” sign in other developed democratic countries. Civil rights laws would kick in and the local civil rights division would probably get their their business license suspended. Media would also make an issue of it. There might even be boycotts, spray paint, and broken windows.

Not in Japan. Quite the opposite, actually. When we took up the abovementioned Otaru Case in 1999, we actually had people and opinion leaders rallying on the side of the exclusionary establishments. They made sophistic arguments claiming that unique Japanese culture must be protected from allegedly illiterate, ignorant, and rampaging foreigners. (A column explicitly titled “Antiforeigner discrimination is a right for Japanese people” even appeared in The Japan Times.) Or that businesses could exclude anyone anytime for anything. (Try making that argument to the Burakumin, for example, and see how far you get.) One establishment mentioned that their patrons have bad WWII memories (to which we replied, “What about German customers?”)

But it wasn’t just offhand, ill-considered comments. The government was even complicit back then. The Potemkin department for overseeing discriminatory issues in Japan, the Ministry of Justice’s Bureau of Human Rights (which has only advisory, not punitive powers), actually coached the Otaru City Government in writing NOT to do anything about their “Japanese Only” bathhouses — because, they argued, it would legally carry no penalty!

And that’s only talking about the discrimination that’s clearly signposted. Now consider, for example, renting an apartment in Japan or trying to get a job at the “Hello Work” unemployment agency. Racist landlords and corporate practices are so normal that explicitly stating “no foreign applicants” in their descriptions is perfectly acceptable.

This is all really funny, because Japan signed a United Nations treaty in 1995 (the CERD) in which it promised to take all effective measures to eliminate all forms of racial discrimination. As the Naha Case proves nearly 30 years later, Japan was just going through the motions of a “developed country,” signing treaties without any intention to enforce them.

So why not just go elsewhere and spend your money at a place that won’t exclude you? Because the problem with leaving “Japanese Only” signs up is that covert discrimination in Japan becomes overt. Racism becomes an option for any bigot who obviously need fear no penalty.

History bears this out. After the Otaru Case made national and international news after 1999, exclusionary signs and rules spread nationwide across industries. This included bars, discos, internet cafes, restaurants, stores and shops, hotels, realtors, schools, and even hospitals. It goes without saying, but these industries have a fundamental impact on a minimum standard of living. It’s not just a matter of getting a drink in a bar. If there’s ever even the possibility that you can’t shop, stay, reside, receive an education, or get medical treatment, you’re in trouble.

So if you leave discrimination alone, it not only spreads — it mutates. Consider the most elaborate exclusionary sign I ever saw: “Chinese and naturalized citizens, war orphans, and children with mixed Chinese blood are absolutely refused entry. Only pure-blooded Japanese males only.” That’s grounded in some mighty specific prejudices.

But why do these places exclude in the first place? In my interviews over more than a decade, their standpoints range from, “Foreign customers were disruptive to my business” to “I personally hate foreigners.” Some who thought their prejudice through a bit more cite an apparently exclusive clientele that want their dining or bathing experience to be “foreigner-free.” Even those who never dealt with a foreign customer cited rumor to claim that something bad might happen, so the signs were a preventative measure.

All point to a pretty simple logic: If foreigners are let in, they’ll go bankrupt because Japanese customers will stay away. (Even though plenty of these places went under anyway despite their exclusionary policies. So maybe it wasn’t the foreigners after all.)

But here’s the most insidious thing: enforcement. To the gatekeepers, a “foreigner” can be determined on sight. This happened in practice when people who didn’t “look Japanese” enough were still refused entry even after they showed proof of Japanese citizenship. That means they excluded by race, not nationality. “Japanese Only” signs exclude Japanese too.

So you see, the “Japanese Only” sign in Naha was nothing new or all that simple. What’s new is that the Okinawa media and the local government played a role in getting it down.

After decades of thinking about this, I’ve come to the conclusion that seems to be the best route.

With the Otaru Case, we tried everything else. We spent more than a year negotiating with the exclusionary businesses, the local, regional, and national governments, and the general public. Then we spent much money and many years in Civil Court trying to get one place to open their doors and one government to take responsibility for their years of negligence. I even took the Otaru Case to Japan’s Supreme Court in 2005, which stunningly denied cert because it somehow “didn’t involve any Constitutional issues.” At least the courts formally acknowledged that “Japanese Only” signs are in fact “racial discrimination.” But that was a lot of energy spent on one bathhouse. Now try doing that for all the other places that exclude foreigners.

As the Naha Case shows, the most effective way to get an exclusionary sign down is to get it in the media and make the government fear an impact on local tourism. In a society where issues of human rights perpetually take a back seat to business ethics (which, in any society, would happily make money selling poison to the public as long as there’s no law to stop them), you really have few other reliable or effective options in Japan.

Sad to say, but it’s as simple as that.

ENDS

“Japanese Only” sign on izakaya bar in Naha, Okinawa (Okinawa Times and Japan Today). Removed after govt scrutiny and media exposure.

Posted on October 11, 2023October 12, 2023 by Debito Arudou, Ph.D.

mytest

Hi Blog. Here’s the latest entry for the Rogues’ Gallery of Exclusionary Establishments, where a bar in Okinawa refuses all “customers from overseas” (=”Japanese Only“) to enter the bar. The difference is that the media took it up and ran them through the wringer of logic. Not to mention they faced government scrutiny, which history shows makes all the difference. It came out poorly for the bar, so they took the sign down. Good. Debito Arudou, Ph.D.

(courtesy Okinawa Times)

Okinawa pub posts ‘Japanese only’ admission sign based on some shaky logic

Oct. 6 06:00 am JST 116 Comments

By Casey Baseel, SoraNews24, courtesy of Eric

https://japantoday.com/category/national/okinawa-pub-posts-‘japanese-only’-admission-sign-based-on-some-shaky-logic?

TOKYO: Outside an izakaya (Japanese pub) in Naha, the capital city of Okinawa Prefecture, a notice had been posted the management. At the top was an illustration of a cute cheerful samurai, bowing deeply as in greeting, but the words below were decidedly less welcoming.

The first line of the notice, written in Japanese, translates to “Because our staff can only speak Japanese,” which is repeated immediately below in English. After that, though, the notice continued in English only, declaring: “Japanese Only (sorry) We don’t allow customers from overseas to enter our bar.”

▼ A photo of the notice

Bars with Japanese-customers-only policies aren’t unheard of in Japan, but they’re becoming increasingly uncommon in the modern age. Moreover, when you do come across such establishments, they’re generally dedicated bars, with menus almost entirely consisting of drinks, and often the presence of hostesses or “floor lady” pseudo-hostesses. Izakaya, on the other hand, are essentially restaurants, where customers are expected to order both food and drinks, and it’s competitively rarer for them to have such exclusionary admission policies.

[Ed: Clearly the author didn’t do much research.]

According to local newspaper Okinawa Times, the notice had been posted since at least a year ago, during which the management has turned away non-Japanese would-be customers. Eventually the sign came to the attention of two members of a Naha residents group that reported it to various government departments, including the Naha City Tourism Division and Okinawa Convention Bureau. This prompted a visit by members of the Tourism Division in August of this year in which they asked the owner to take the sign down, especially in light of increasing numbers of overseas travelers visiting Okinawa following the lifting of pandemic protocols, but the owner refused to do so.

The owner claims that the notice wasn’t meant to be taken as discriminatory intent, saying “We only have one person working the dining hall, and one person in the kitchen, so we don’t have time to spare for customer interaction. We have no intent of discriminating.” Coupled with the sign’s disclaimer that the staff only speaks Japanese, that would seem to indicate that the aim of the no-customers-from-overseas rule was to eliminate time-consuming communication problems, but if that’s really the case, the more appropriate policy would have been “Customers must order in Japanese.” It’s pretty short-sighted to make a blanket assumption that all non-Japanese diners will be unable to speak Japanese, given that the number of people living outside Japan who’ve still acquired some basic proficiency with the language is higher than it’s ever been, as is the number of non-ethnically Japanese residents of Japan, most of whom can order food and drinks in the language without difficulty. Even if the owner’s concern was foreign customers asking for changes in how their food is prepared, something far more common at restaurants outside Japan than within it, a sign saying “No menu substitutions allowed” would be sufficient and succinct.

With the sign getting increased attention, the owner has apparently rethought the Tourism Division’s request to remove it, and at some point in September it was taken down, with the owner saying “The writing was incorrect.”

However, he also added “What I want the government to do isn’t to try to attract travelers from other countries, but to teach people about izakaya culture.” But if what he really wants is a broader understanding of izakaya drinking and dining traditions, presumably on a global scale (since Japanese people are already familiar with those traditions), it’s hard to see how turning people away because they’re not Japanese was going to accomplish that.

Source: Okinawa Times

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Japanese from Okinawa Times
入店拒否の張り紙。英語で「スタッフが日本語しか話せないため／日本人のみ（ごめんなさい）／海外からのお客さまは入店させません」と記す＝９月、那覇市
沖縄タイムズ　2023年10月2日 Courtesy of KM and JK
https://www.okinawatimes.co.jp/articles/-/1232333

那覇市の居酒屋が入り口に「ジャパニーズオンリー」と書いた紙を張り、外国人の入店を拒否していた。国籍による違法な差別で、市民グループが気付き、行政に相談した。現時点で店側は張り紙を取り外しているが、客や通行人を傷つけていた事実は残る。行政による支援や啓発の必要性も浮かぶ。（編集委員・阿部岳）

張り紙は「スタッフが日本語しかしゃべれないため」と書き、さらに英語で外国人の入店禁止を伝える内容。１年ほど前に張り、実際に入店を断ったこともある。拒否された客は「非常に悲しい」とネットに投稿している。
経営者は「ホール担当１人、キッチン担当１人で接客に時間を割けない。差別は意図していない」と主張する。

ただ、国籍だけを理由にした入店拒否は人種差別撤廃条約に反する。静岡地裁浜松支部は１９９９年、街頭の店舗は一般に開放されていると指摘し、外国人の入店を拒否した宝石店に損害賠償を命じた。

那覇市の居酒屋の張り紙を偶然見つけた市民グループの２人は、市の各部署や沖縄観光コンベンションビューローに相談して回った。「沖縄カウンターズ」のメンバーは「これを見た外国人がどれだけ傷つくか。でもいきなり炎上させるのではなく、行政も一緒に円満に解決したかった」という。

相談を受けた市観光課は８月、店を訪問し、「観光客が増える中、好ましくない」と撤去を打診したが、店側は応じなかった。市の担当者は「権限がなく、お願いしかできない」と説明する。

最終的に本紙が９月、取材に訪れると、経営者が「文面は間違っていた」と撤去した。一方で「行政はただ海外客を呼ぶのではなく、居酒屋文化を伝えてほしい」と求める。

問題解決に向けて行政にかけ合ったもう１人、「多文化ネットワークｆｕふ！沖縄」のメンバーは「観光行政も人数や収入だけでない、文化の相互理解につながる観光を目指してほしい。店側が相談できる場所も必要ではないか」と投げかける。

４月に施行された県差別のない社会づくり条例は、事業者に差別解消に向けた努力を求めている。条例の検討委員だった白充（ペクチュン）弁護士は「国籍のみを理由とした入店拒否は条例に抵触しており、実効性が問われる。県民一人一人の意識変容に加え、県が周知徹底する努力も必要だ」と話した。
ENDS

My SNA VM 49: Be Mindful About Cultural Education (Sept 25, 2023), on how teaching people about Japan can backfire if the regular stereotyping found in language education isn’t carefully considered

Posted on September 25, 2023September 25, 2023 by Debito Arudou, Ph.D.

mytest

Hi Blog. Here’s my latest column. Enjoy. Debito Arudou, Ph.D.

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CULTURAL EDUCATION MUST BE DONE MINDFULLY
Japan’s internationalization is inevitable. So is teaching Japan’s future generations of diversity. If done wrong, educating about Japanese culture and society could do more harm than good.
By Debito Arudou, Ph.D., SNA Visible Minorities column 49, Sept 25, 2023

https://shingetsunewsagency.com/2023/09/25/japans-internationalization-is-inevitable-so-is-teaching-japans-future-generations-of-diversity-if-done-wrong-educating-about-japanese-culture-and-society-could-do-more-harm-than/

Like it or not, Japan’s internationalization is happening. There are fewer Japanese and more foreigners than ever. In 2022, the population of Japanese citizens dropped below the 125 million mark for the first time in Japan’s modern era, while the registered Non-Japanese (NJ) population reached a record high at over 3 million, or 2.4% of the total population.

That can only grow. Even if the NJ population numerically stayed the same as it is now, its percentage of the total population will still rise due to Japan’s below-replacement birthrates. But the NJ population will not stay the same — the economics of Japan’s aging labor force is reaching the point where officials see the writing on the wall. According to a recent Kyodo News survey, a whopping 86% of Japan’s municipalities want more NJ workers to do the jobs and save their senescent cities from extinction.

All of these figures do not, of course, include all the multicultural and multiethnic children already in Japan with diverse identities and backgrounds — routinely ignored because Japan’s Census does not measure for ethnicity. So if anything, Japan’s internationalization is grossly underestimated.

TEACH THE CHILDREN WELL

The front line of this trend is Japan’s education system, where the children of immigrants make an immediate and urgent impact on society. This is not news. For more than a quarter century, local governments have begged for enhanced services to help their residents with language and acculturation barriers assimilate into their schools and communities. The national government has basically ignored them.

But we are seeing some progress. Multilingual manuals about local customs and rules have long been issued by governments and civil society, including some helpful training videos to help explain elementary school rules and cultural practices in simpler Japanese. A good example was produced by students at Wakayama University and featured in the Mainichi last year.

This is highly laudable. But a point of caution: This isn’t just a matter of telling all Newcomers to “Do as the Romans do.” Without mindful production of teaching materials grounded in solid social science, cultural education could have the opposite effect: Solidifying stereotypes, entrenching prejudice, and making the perceived newcomer feel like a perpetually subordinated outsider.

Consider some bad habits that are the default mode:

One is systemic — the tendency towards stereotyping within language teaching itself. I recall my French language textbooks introducing “French things” (petit pan, grande pan, etc.) as something all French people ate. No mention, say, of couscous, or other ethnic but Francophone cuisines. Or for that matter of other Francophone people. All French people in my textbooks were white, which simply didn’t reflect reality.

To the untrained eye, that meant that whatever doesn’t fit a textbook image of “Frenchness” wasn’t seen as “French.” It put up artificial walls between peoples simply out of habit or convenience. That’s because basic language training necessarily tends to overgeneralize about societies and boil them down to foundational language. But resorting to prototype omits developments in society, such as cultural diversity from international migration.

That’s why we need trained eyes to avoids stereotyping. Let social scientists, not just linguists or untrained do-gooders, also have input into the learning process.

But there are also some bad habits that are intrinsic to Japan, easily seen when even the most educated people teach Japanese culture…

BEWARE “UNIQUE JAPAN”

Consider the narrative focus on “Japanese uniqueness,” as in, “only Japan has this,” for just about anything worthy of portraying as “Japanese.” For example, I’ve seen educational materials claiming that enjoying four seasons and eating octopus are “uniquely Japanese.”. Calamari, anyone?

One problem with the “uniqueness trope” is that it prioritizes differences over similarities. This is the natural outcome of humanities as a field seeing culture as a constellation of contrasts. Anything not remarkable or dramatic enough to cause “culture shock” doesn’t seem to be all that worthy of study.

Yet no matter what, people are far more similar than they are different (start with the fact that we are carbon-based mammals and work up). And by portraying even the most mundane things (such as using chopsticks, taking off your shoes at the doorway, or sorting your garbage) as some kind of cultural minefield only serves to make study of other societies unduly formidable and anal-retentive.

So focus on practical goals. Give them the right words to accomplish the tasks and things will flow from there.

The other problem with fixating on difference to the point of “uniqueness” is that it encourages ascription and exclusion. Anything deviating from the portrayed image of “Japaneseness” automatically becomes “foreign.”

Consider the political outcomes of this. Let’s say you have a suggestion for how things could be done better, but alas, you’re a foreigner? Too bad. It won’t work in Japan because we are unique and not like any other foreign country and we do things differently. Foreign things must automatically be different or they wouldn’t be foreign.

But what if a Japanese suggests the same thing? Well, we can’t accept that either. Obviously it’s still not the norm, because if it were, you wouldn’t be suggesting a change.

Either way, the door is slammed on social change. Eliminating the possibility of any cultural overlap reinforces the “us versus them” mindset and feeds directly into social othering, all of which are counterproductive to societies evolving.

“WE JAPANESE”

Another problem is portraying Japan as a monolith. Guidebooks on Japan tend to represent it as a one-size-fits-all experience, and that “Japanese behavior” is predictable down to topic sentences without exception: “We Japanese think or behave this way.” Switch on the TV (especially NHK World) and you’ll see that narrative reinforced daily.

That’s just stereotyping all over again, and it ignores all the regional differences that plainly exist once you get to know Japan as individuals, regions, dialects, and local mores.

Whenever I get asked to say something about Japan, especially by people who want to go there and experience it for themselves (which I always heartily encourage), I always add the caveat that, “Your mileage may vary, depending on how you’re perceived.” If I were shorter, darker-haired or -skinned, female or non-binary, younger or older etc., my experience of interactions with Japanese society would differ.

Teaching people about life in Japan has to incorporate the inevitability of diversity and exception. There are just so many Japans out there.

The knock-on ill-effect of portraying all Japanese as being a certain way (including physical appearance) means that those who aren’t are not “real Japanese.”

This feeds directly into teaching the students and future residents of Japan that in the end they don’t really belong here. Even if they learn the rules, they never be part of the group that makes the rules.

Why do you think so few of the Non-Japanese on Caregiver Visas who underwent Japan’s very difficult nursing program stayed on afterwards? Because they were only trained to work, not belong to the guild that trained them, or ever assimilate and become Japanese.

“YOU FOREIGNERS”

One final problem to be aware of is that teachers and students should not assume the mantle of what I call “Cultural Ambassadors.” Being told that “Japan is this way” and “How is it in your society?” As if they as individuals could possibly represent whole societies with any real accuracy. After all, being an ambassador takes very specific training in social science, including diplomacy, cultural representation, negotiation, and conflict resolution.

The problem with untrained “do-gooders” indulging in cultural education, and “culture vultures” trying to be helpful and “taking foreigners under their wing,” is that they’re generally not mindful of what they’re doing. They’re often not trying to be a friend on your terms. They’re often studying you like an animal in a zoo or a protozoan in a Petri dish, treating you like a pet or a means to an end.

How many failed relationships and marriages have resulted from people glomming onto you because they were “Gaijin Groupies”? They liked you as in idea more than you as an individual.

Let’s not let cultural education at the compulsory education level fall into these bad habits.

SO WHAT DO DO?

A lot of the tweaks are simple. Make sure that language generalizing about Japan allows for exceptions. “Some Japanese… most Japanese… almost all Japanese.”

But some educational materials must show some awareness of the politics of inclusivity. Make sure that people of diversity are also included in textbook perceptions of the Self, as a part of Japanese society. That if they learn the rules and assimilate, that they too can have a role in being part of the process of rule creation.

Also, be aware that there are always politics behind any cultural training. Make sure that the “How-Tos” don’t overstep their bounds. Focus on the rules and how to follow them, and avoid going beyond that to demand people give up their power and become obedient “Model Minorities.”

How to do that? See them as individuals here for good trying to learn the ropes. Help them become residents of Japan, if not colleagues and friends. Don’t treat them something temporary, as if they are a rare bird with remarkable plumage that magically alighted on your windowsill, here only for an instant and gone tomorrow.

Simply put, show some real empathy. What would you want to know if you were moving into a new society and trying to fit in? Treat Newcomers and neophytes as you would like to be treated. Sounds obvious to say, but all sorts of bad habits get in the way.

ENDS

My SNA col 48: “Visible Minorities: Citizenship and Authoritarian Racism”, on how conservative movements worldwide are using racist “real citizens” tropes to reserve power for themselves and create minoritarian governments (Aug 22, 2023)

Posted on August 22, 2023August 22, 2023 by Debito Arudou, Ph.D.

mytest

Visible Minorities: Citizenship and Authoritarian Racism
Shingetsu News Agency, August 21, 2023 by DEBITO ARUDOU in COLUMN
https://shingetsunewsagency.com/2023/08/21/visible-minorities-citizenship-and-authoritarian-racism/

Subtitle: Authoritarians are once again trying to racialize citizenship. In Asia, that’s quite normal. The problem is that conservative movements worldwide are similarly trying to shore up their dwindling popularity by undemocratically disenfranchising the very immigrants they had once invited over.

SNA (Tokyo) — News Item: On August 1, 2023, Dr. Mahathir bin Mohamad, former prime minister of Malaysia, tweeted his thoughts on multiracial immigration: “It is normal for migrants wishing to become citizens of any country to identify themselves linguistically and culturally with the definitive people of their adopted country. They would break off and reject their links with their countries of origin. Certainly, the children and grandchildren of the new citizens would have forgotten their previous languages and culture.”

https://twitter.com/chedetofficial/status/1686205569806536704

This tweet from a world opinion leader isn’t just wrong-headed, it’s dangerous.

Not only is it trying to disenfranchise entire peoples through racialized attitudes towards citizenship, it’s actually threatening democracy itself.

Can’t see it? You’re not alone. The lack of public outcry is part of the problem. I put this down to a world largely untrained in civics. Racialized attitudes towards immigration and citizenship are normal in Asia, and conservatives worldwide are trying to popularize them in their own societies too. Citizenship is the gateway to political enfranchisement in society, and messing with it means reviving old racist policies all over again.

Let me explain from the perspective of a political scientist.

First, it’s surprisingly difficult to get people to see Dr. Mahathir’s tweet for what it is: racist hate speech.

It would be nice if people could see the long-term implications of this proposal without a long, elaborate explanation. But many people dismiss political science as a science at all, one that develops a skill set and a trained eye. Instead, they throw up their hands and see any political opinion as fair dinkum, or too complicated to deal with due to freedom of speech. That blinds them to the fact that Dr. Mahathir is floating a policy trial balloon to willfully exclude people.

Consider the practical application of this proposal: newcomer residents (and their Visible Minority children) must prove their loyalty to a country by giving up the multicultural and multiethnic sides of themselves.

This isn’t just a dick move by some politician taking political pot shots by saying, “You come here, you speak our language.” When Dr. Mahathir demands people become “full Malay” (with arbitrary goalposts determined, naturally, by Malays), that’s a pretty convenient way to keep all the power in the family.

Then we get to the historical revisionism…

Rest of the article at
https://shingetsunewsagency.com/2023/08/21/visible-minorities-citizenship-and-authoritarian-racism/

Kyodo: “Japanese population falls in all 47 prefectures for first time”. Actually, untrue, even according to the article itself. Once again, Japan’s exclusionary population tallies are only for “Japanese nationals”, not all people living in Japan

Posted on July 31, 2023July 31, 2023 by Debito Arudou, Ph.D.

mytest

Hi Blog. One thing keeping me from commenting more frequently is the pressure I put on myself to write an essay before getting to the news article in question. I’m going to do less of that in future; just briefly commenting and then getting to the article/issue in question.

The point of this post is to demonstrate some more Embedded Racism that is normalized in Japan’s media and public policy. In its official population tallies, Japan will only count “Japanese nationals” as actual people living in Japan. Foreigners are mentioned in the Kyodo News article below, yes, but look how things are worded in it. I’ve underlined the questionable bits.

Again, this is normal in Japan’s population tallies, even after more than 10 years since the local registry reforms began including foreign residents on its juuminhyou Registry Certificates. It’s a highly questionable practice in terms of accurate demographics and social science, not to mention disrespectful of all the contributions foreign residents make.

Debito.org says that anyone registered as a resident in Japan should get counted as a part of the population of Japan. No walls or caveats. Little reforms like these can start now to normalize no distinctions and cost no tax money. It’s just a matter of considering NJ as fellow human beings living lives in Japan like everyone else. Debito Arudou, Ph.D.

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Japanese population falls in all 47 prefectures for first time

The population of Japanese nationals fell 801,000 in 2022 from a year earlier to 122,423,038, marking the largest drop since the survey began in 1968, government data showed Wednesday.

Japan Times/Kyodo News, July 26, 2023

https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2023/07/26/national/japan-population-fall/

The population of Japanese nationals fell 801,000 in 2022 from a year earlier to 122,423,038, marking the largest drop since the survey began in 1968, government data showed Wednesday. | BLOOMBERG
KYODO

The population of Japanese nationals fell 801,000 in 2022 from a year earlier to 122,423,038, marking the largest drop and the first time all 47 prefectures have seen a decline since the survey began in 1968, government data showed Wednesday.

As of Jan. 1, 2023, Japan’s population, including foreign residents, stood at 125,416,877, down around 511,000 from a year earlier, according to a demographics survey by the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications.

The trend indicates an urgent need for Japan to develop measures to address the declining birthrate and improve employment opportunities for youth and women in regional areas. [NB: Not immigration.]

While Prime Minister Fumio Kishida has called for implementing “unprecedented” measures to boost the birthrate in a last-ditch effort to arrest population decline by 2030, doubts persist about whether such initiatives, which are mostly extensions of existing policies, will be effective.

Japanese nationals declined for the 14th consecutive year in 2022, with a record low of 772,000 births in Japan significantly exceeded by a record high 1.57 million deaths.

Nationals working or studying abroad accounted for a decline of around 7,000 of the population.

The number of Japanese nationals in Okinawa, which had been an outlier the previous year, shrank for first time since comparable data was made available in 1973, the data showed.

The foreign population rose for the first time in three years by around 289,000 to 2,993,839 in the reporting year, as the relaxation of strict COVID-19 border controls facilitated the return of international students and technical interns. [NB: Temporary people, not residents.]

The National Institute of Population and Social Security Research estimates that foreign nationals will make up 10% of the population by 2070, with some local governments already engaged in efforts to attract professional talent from Asia.

By prefecture, only Tokyo saw an overall population increase due to the high influx of foreigners to the capital, while Akita Prefecture saw the largest population decrease at 1.65%.

[Note original Kyodo headline saying all prefecture populations fell. Again, foreigners don’t count.]

Among municipalities, 92.4% saw a decrease in the population of Japanese nationals, while 7.6% experienced an increase.

Those age 14 and under accounted for 11.82% of the Japanese population, falling by 0.18 percentage point from the previous year, while people age 65 and over increased by 0.15 point to 29.15%.

The working population, or people between 15 and 64, rose by 0.03 point to 59.03% of the overall population.

My SNA Visible Minorities 46: “Visible Minorities: Departing Japan at Middle Age” (May 15, 2023)

Posted on May 15, 2023June 20, 2023 by Debito Arudou, Ph.D.

mytest

Hi Blog. My latest column offers a frank assessment of living your life out in Japan as an immigrant. It of course can be done, but most of you will find that even after decades swimming against the current in terms of legal status and social acceptance, you will get no commensurate reward after all your efforts. In fact, I found that life opportunities dwindle as you age in Japan, and you get locked into a dreary, impoverished lifestyle like most other elderly here. If you think you can avoid this situation, power to you, but I suggest you make your decision to stay permanently or not by age 40. Good luck. Debito Arudou, Ph.D.

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Visible Minorities: Departing Japan at Middle Age
MAY 15, 2023 by DEBITO ARUDOU in COLUMN
https://shingetsunewsagency.com/2023/05/15/visible-minorities-departing-japan-at-middle-age/

SNA (Tokyo) — As you have probably have heard, SNA President Michael Penn will be moving his operations overseas. He’s leaving Japan. At his age, that’s probably a good idea. I speak from experience.

I came to Japan during the “Bubble Years” of the 1980s, when Japan was ascendant upon the world stage and buying everything in sight. Money orgiastically sloshed around the economy.

Finding work was pretty easy. Lots of Japanese companies were trying to “internationalize” by hiring token foreign staff who were looking for an international experience. Or, if being a corporate drone wasn’t your thing, you could teach English for about US$100 an hour. It was one great big party. I came over, fell in love with the language and a girl, and decided to make a go of it here.

It was a pretty good go. I lived in Japan for 24 years, married and had kids, became tenured faculty at a university, bought land, built a house, and learned the language and culture well enough to write books in Japanese and take out Japanese citizenship. In terms of trying to assimilate into Japan, I don’t think there’s a lot more I could have done. I was an ideal immigrant.

But then, like Michael, I too left Japan. That’s both a pity and, in my case, an inevitability.

Japan should be trying harder to keep people like us. It really doesn’t. The longer you’re in Japan, the more your opportunities dwindle.

Opportunities Denied

Let’s first talk about the natural obstacles to people staying on, starting with how difficult it is to keep a visa.

Unless you marry (and stay married to) a Japanese, it’s quite difficult for foreigners to control their own professional lives in Japan. Becoming a salaryman is one thing, where you can work until you drop, but promotion is tougher for foreigners, and they are the first ones laid off in any economic downturn. Moreover, the types of jobs you can take are mostly “foreigner” jobs in certain industries.

So how about starting your own business in Japan? It can happen, and there are a few successful entrepreneurs. But I’ve seen many, many more failures. Some were dragged down by onerous requirements such as expensive shareholder investment and being forced to hire Japanese staff. Others got tripped up either by mandarin rigmarole that is designed more for the bureaucrats’ convenience than yours, or by pedantic officials who are out to get you, finding any mistake in your paperwork so they can reflexively revert to the “culture of no.”

You’re better off establishing a headquarters overseas and setting up a branch in Japan than registering a company in Japan proper. But if you do that, suspicion is triggered in the Immigration Bureau and you face even more visa rigmarole.

That’s all before we get to how Japan has toughened up its visa requirements over the years.

Compared to when I first arrived, it’s harder to graduate from a three-month visa to a one-year; and so is getting a three-year and Permanent Residency, especially for people of color or from developing countries. The assumption is that people from poor countries are only in Japan for the money, not to positively contribute to Japanese society as a resident and taxpayer like everyone else.

In any case, the mandarins’ overall attitude is that foreigners must prove themselves worthy of the honor of staying in Japan. Japan’s graveyard of defunct visa statuses, discontinued because they had qualifications so ludicrous that few people applied, reflects that.

The clearest indication that Japan really doesn’t want us to stay is the lack of an official immigration policy, an official Ministry of Immigration, or other governmental organs at the national level to help foreigners become Japanese. Politicians have repeatedly said that they want foreigners to come work for awhile but not stay on. Take them at their word.

Nevertheless, You Persisted

But let’s say you have satisfied all these requirements and gained Permanent Residency or even Japanese citizenship. What do you get for after all that effort? Not enough.

You start realizing this when you hit middle age in Japan. Around 40 I could see where I had been and where I was heading, and it looked pretty bleak.

This is because I was seeing how old people actually lived in Japan. Yes, there are great networks for them to be active both physically and mentally, including mountain climbing, gateball, mahjong, or go boardgames. Japan’s medical system is very good, especially compared to, for example, the hellscape that is US healthcare. Of course there’s good food and drink to be had everywhere.

That might be satisfactory if you’re a Japanese old fart. As a foreign old fart, you’re stuck in treadmill conversations with people who have mostly lived for work and often don’t have many interests beyond it. If they are educated, they’ll often see you as a cultural curiosity to be studied, or as a basis of comparison to sharpen their predispositions informed by the “we Japanese” superiority complexes.

If you can psychologically handle a life where your friends are mostly insular and conservative, enjoy. If not, you’re going to be lonely.

Chances are you’re also going to be poor. The average payout for the Japanese pension, according to Reuters in 2019, is about 150,000 yen per month. That might cover rent and leave enough for a comfortable lifestyle in many of Japan’s dying countryside towns, but not in the major cities.

This should not have come as any surprise. Even during the Bubble Years Japan’s elderly were poor, and were being sent overseas to “silver zone” enclaves so their yen could go farther with the exchange rates.

But now that the value of the yen is dropping, that has all slipped away. Forget traveling much, especially overseas, unless you have additional savings or means of your own. It’s highly likely you’ll find yourself stuck in Japan.

This situation will not improve, because Japan has ignored its demographic issues for decades. All the way back in 2000, both the United Nations and the Japanese government agreed that Japan’s aging society would soon become top-heavy with geriatrics with not enough young taxpayers paying into the pension.

The proposed solution–then, as now–was immigration. Foreigners were going to save Japan. But, again, the Japanese government assiduously declined to take us.

Policymakers clung to homogeneous-society narratives and stopgap measures like the exploitative “trainee” visa system, and watched pension contributions per capita dwindle. What is their solution now that the warnings from nearly a quarter-century ago proved accurate? Raise the retirement age to the late 60s and pay out less pension. We’ll probably see Japan’s retirement age raised to 70 before too long.

By the time you want to retire, you’ll get a pittance, or might not be expected to retire at all.

Twilight Years in Japan

Let’s say you’ve done better future planning than the Japanese government did, and you can live your middle and late age comfortably anywhere you wish. Why not spend your later middle age and twilight years in Japan?

Because, as I said above, the longer you’re in Japan the more your opportunities dwindle.

Let’s start with dealing with the inevitable “midlife crisis.” It’s highly likely your current job has become boring or gone sour. Often the younger workers aren’t happy with having a foreign senpai above them, and won’t treat you with the dignity and respect that was required of you when you were lower on the totem pole. Changing a job in Japan is culturally frowned upon. You’ll lose both salary and seniority. You’ll probably have to take what you can get, like everyone else.

Eventually all that’s left is the “make-work” jobs for seniors. Can you imagine wearing a uniform and flagging people past traffic cones? Sure, it’s nice to supplement your income and get out of the house, but it’s probably going to be boring at best, humiliating and a soft target for bullying at worst. Again, people aren’t going to forget that you’re a foreigner.

The fact is that geriatrics in Japan are expected to be impoverished, housebound, and satisfied with monotonous days full of television, drinking, and gateball. Sure, you might have your “forever home,” but you’re expected to die in it. You won’t get much money if you try to resell your house or other equity and expect to live on the proceeds, as only the land is worth anything. You can’t, for example, buy an RV and live the nomadic life of retirees on pensions in Western societies. You can only live like you’re expected to live.

Personally, I couldn’t take this encroaching monotony. Around the time I turned 45, I realized that the main reason I had loved life in Japan was the adventures–the curious and weird things that happened around me daily. But the more familiar I became with Japan, the adventures largely evaporated.

After more than twenty years in Japan, every day became Groundhog Day. I could sleepwalk through most conversations. I had to find diversions to alleviate the boredom; they no longer found me.

The fact is, unless a brick had fallen from the sky and brained me, I could predict what was going to happen from the morning when I woke up to the moment I went to bed. So I decided to leave.

What Happens If You Leave Japan?

Leaving Japan is also made into something difficult. You’re constantly reminded that if you ever depart for good, you’ll lose everything and have to start from zero, especially professionally.

A very sad discovery is that your Japan experiences don’t count for much in other countries, given that now China is the Asian regional power. Even if Japan had retained its luster, there were always people overseas with Japanese roots competing for your Japan-specialist job, and got it by arguing bald-facedly that foreigners can’t know as much as Japanese with “real Japanese blood.” The Japanese Only attitudes you see in Japan’s hiring practices are exported worldwide.

If you have a family in tow, it’s even tougher to leave. They’re especially scared by the Japanese media constantly rattling on about how dangerous life is overseas. If your kids are still in the Japanese school system, they’ll begrudge being uprooted too. They know that if they ever return to Japan, they’ll never be considered “Japanese” enough because they haven’t passed through the Japanese education system.

Coming to Japan was always a carefully baited hook–if you get past all the obstacles, you’ll find yourself trapped in a society where you’re not allowed to truly belong, yet are constantly expected to try.

Yet some people do leave, sometimes permanently, sometimes not.

People like Japan specialists Alex Kerr and Donald Keene regularly split their time between Japan and overseas. Authors Haruki Murakami lives permanently in Honolulu and Marie “spark joy” Kondo lives in Los Angeles.

Even famed Tale of Genji translator Edward G. Seidensticker departed Japan back in 1962, signing off with, “The Japanese are just like other people. They work hard to support their–but no. They are not like other people. They are infinitely more clannish, insular, parochial, and one owes it to one’s sense of self-respect to retain a feeling of outrage at the insularity. To have this sense of outrage go dull is to lose one’s will to communicate and that, I think, is death. So I am going home.”

Eventually Seidensticker went back on these words, living his life on both sides of the Pacific, dying in Tokyo in 2007 at age 86.

I too spend extended periods in Japan and am much happier (and prosperous) by having a foot in two countries. I can pick and choose the best of both societies when I want, and I think I’ve earned that option.

But I had to make a choice: I wouldn’t have been able to do that with Japan as my home base. Having a “totalization agreement” for both my pension systems helps too. I’m having to catch up with my pension contributions in my new tax home, but fortunately the opportunities are here for me to do so.

So if you’re thinking about staying in Japan permanently, I suggest you make the final decision by age 40. After that, you’ll be stuck in a rut in Japan. Then if you change your mind, you’re probably not going to make an easy transition back to your home country, as your friends and family themselves retire and die off. Fair warning.

Godspeed, Michael Penn. May you and SNA prosper more in another society than Japan would let you. ENDS

My SNA Visible Minorities 45: “Judges Strip Equal Protection from Naturalized Citizens”, on the unjust Aigi Country Club decision (Apr 24, 2023) (full text)

Posted on April 23, 2023November 1, 2023 by Debito Arudou, Ph.D.

mytest

Hi Blog. My blog post from yesterday has become a full-blown column at the Shingetsu News Agency. Have a read, and lament for Japan’s future if horrible legal precedents like this are allowed to stand. Debito Arudou, Ph.D.

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Visible Minorities: Judges Strip Equal Protection from Naturalized Citizens
Shingetsu News Agency, April 24, 2023 by DEBITO ARUDOU in COLUMN
https://shingetsunewsagency.com/2023/04/24/visible-minorities-judges-strip-equal-protection-from-naturalized-citizens/

The website archiving and substantiating all of the claims below is at
https://www.debito.org/?p=17240

SNA (Tokyo) — It’s the next stage of evolution in Japan’s variant of racial discrimination: a naturalized Japanese citizen was last year denied membership at a golf course—explicitly for being a former foreigner. He sued. This month a district court in Mie Prefecture ruled that this was not an illegal act of discrimination.

You read that right: not illegal. Follow me down this rabbit hole.

Aigi Country Club in Kani city, Gifu Prefecture, refused a former Zainichi Korean with Japanese citizenship. Their justification, according to the Asahi Shinbun, was that “our club has a quota for foreign nationals and former foreign nationals who have become naturalized Japanese and restricts new memberships. We currently have no vacancies in that quota.”

In court, Aigi Country Club duplicitously denied outright racism by claiming that they refused him for more reasons than foreign roots. It didn’t matter. The judges acknowledged that the plaintiff was refused for being foreign and they still ruled against him. They accepted that this was an instance of discrimination, but it wasn’t enough discrimination.

The judges ruled that a golfing club by design is a “closed and private organization with strong personal ties among its members” and that Article 21 of the Constitution guarantees “freedom of association.” In their reading, private groups are free to decide their membership criteria and, at any rate, playing golf is “not indispensable for social life.”

In sum, it wasn’t an instance of discrimination “beyond socially acceptable limits.”

Really?

Exclusionism is rampant at Japan’s golf courses. Last May the Asahi Shinbun provided an excellent overview of how Japan’s country clubs routinely refuse not only membership but also entry to foreign golfers. Some have even refused women. According to interviews, they have “nationality clauses” (i.e. Japanese Only rules) because “the atmosphere slightly changes when there are foreigners around.”

To them, these are just their rules, established long ago. In its case, the Aigi Country Club started in 1964. They won’t change without outside pressure, such as when the International Olympic Committee forced changes in a few Japanese clubs before they were permitted to host international competitions. Without such international scrutiny, they are content to preserve their discrimination in amber.

This Aigi ruling clearly empowers golf bigots to stay the course.

Legal Logic of the Ruling

There are two elements of the logic behind the ruling that deserve to be highlighted.

First is the “beyond socially acceptable limits” reasoning, which has been circulating for generations within Japan’s jurisprudence. It holds that some discrimination is inevitable (for example, separating bathrooms by gender). So as long as institutions or individuals don’t go beyond the “socially acceptable level” of discrimination, there is no legal sanction.

A problem with this approach is that “social acceptance” is determined entirely by the subjective impressions of individual judges. There is no hard data or social science involved. It’s all in the eyes of the judges.

The United Nations has repeatedly criticized Japan for this kind of reasoning (especially its legal corollary of “rational discrimination”).

In this case, even prior Japanese court precedent disagrees. In a similar golf club suit brought in 1995 by a Zainichi Korean plaintiff, the Tokyo District Court ruled that a denial of membership on the grounds of nationality was unconstitutional under Article 14—all people are equal under the law. The Tokyo court also previously dismissed some other bits of the Aigi decision—ruling that golf is a leisure activity and thus a necessary place to socialize. It also noted that, since golf memberships can be purchased on the market, they aren’t really all that exclusive.

Unfortunately, a separate lawsuit in 2001 by another Zainichi Korean against a golf course ruled against him, affirming the primacy of private corporations to choose their members, even if that includes excluding foreigners.

This brings us to the second big issue: the plaintiff in the Aigi case was not a foreigner.

What’s even the point of naturalizing and taking Japanese nationality if the legal status conveyed offers no equal protections?

We’ve already seen this occur within the Japan Sumo Association, which also limits the number of foreign wrestlers in sumo stables. Even if they become Japanese citizens, they are still counted as “foreigners.” Nobody has yet challenged this practice as unconstitutional.

The plaintiff in the Aigi Country Club Case effectively did challenge it, and yet the Aigi judges accepted the argument that Japanese citizens with foreign roots are not equally protected under the law. They will forever remain “Japanese” with an asterisk.

Open Season on Foreign Roots

If the Mie ruling stands, there will be nothing preventing–at least at the formal legal level–almost any private enterprise from putting up a “Members Only” sign and enforcing “nationality clauses.” Many institutions could conceivably argue for keeping memberships exclusive in order to “preserve the atmosphere” at their venues.

It’s not even unprecedented. During the 2002 World Cup, coordinated “Members Only” signs went up on restaurants and bars throughout Sapporo’s party district; other “Members Only” places like public bathhouses can be found on the Debito.org Rogues’ Gallery of “Japanese Only” Exclusionary Establishments. What’s next? Sports clubs? Hotels? Hospitals? Schools? In fact, all of these kinds of institutions have been found to possess formal and informal “Japanese Only” rules.

Thanks to the Aigi Country Club case, bigots are being offered stronger legal grounds to maintain and extend discrimination.

Naturally, this means that not only first generation immigrants, but also those born in Japan may discover that they are not equal under the law.

With all of Japan’s international marriages, there are hundreds of thousands of Japanese children with a foreign parent or relative. The ruling of Aigi Country Club case means that if some children “look foreign” and due to their presence the “atmosphere slightly changes,” then they can be excluded by organizations because it is “socially acceptable” to do so.

Of course, it is remarkably easy in many cases to spot any mudblood whose kin or relative has a katakana or odd kanji name. Through this ruling, children can be regarded as biologically radioactive and refusable. Citizenship will not protect them.

The Signposts Along the Way

Finally, let’s put things in a larger context. This decision is actually part of a broader trend eroding all civil protections for “foreigners” (however defined) within the Japanese judiciary.

Consider this arc of precedents:

1) The Ana Bortz case of 1998-1999 found that foreigners in Japan were protected by the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (CERD) against being turned away by private enterprises open to the public (in this case a jewelry store). The court awarded Bortz ¥2 million.

2) The Otaru Hot Springs case of 1993-2005 found that two foreigners and one naturalized Japanese citizen (yours truly) were not allowed to be turned away from a private enterprise (in this case a public bathhouse). The courts eventually whittled the award down to ¥1 million yen each. However, the courts undermined the Bortz Case by ruling that, a) the CERD offered no actual protection against racial discrimination—it was merely a guideline without the force of law; and, b) racial discrimination did happen, but that was not necessarily illegal. Discrimination only becomes illegal when it goes “beyond socially acceptable limits.” Sound familiar? To cap things off, the Supreme Court also summarily dismissed the case as involving no constitutional protections—not even Article 14, which also explicitly forbids racial discrimination.

3) The Steve McGowan case of 2004-2006 undermined the Bortz and Otaru precedents further, finding no protection for his denial by a private enterprise (an eyeglass store). Instead, the ruling found that any discrimination that occurred was essentially due to a misunderstanding. McGowan, as a non-native speaker, allegedly didn’t understand enough Japanese to portray his case correctly. This ruling was handed down in spite of the fact that the defendant was caught on tape explicitly saying that he refused McGowan because he “hates black people.” The initial ruling was overturned on appeal, but McGowan’s court award was also whittled down to only ¥350,000, insufficient even to cover his legal fees.

4) The Aigi County Club case potentially drops rights down to near zero. It finds that: a) there are no inherent protections for foreigners; b) even if they have Japanese citizenship; c) and even if everyone admits that the discrimination was nationality or ethnicity-based. It’s not a legal problem to discriminate because golf clubs are designed to be exclusive, by whatever standards they choose to employ. This is “socially acceptable” and thus legally permissible.

I hope I’m not the first one telling you this, but Japan has no national law against racial discrimination, despite treaty promises back in 1995 to pass one “without delay” when it ratified the CERD.

At a UN hearing in 2000, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs officially claimed that “the Constitution of Japan stipulates not only guarantee of being equal as Japanese nationals under the law but also guarantee of equality of all rights as Japanese nationals. Therefore, there is no discrimination at all for civil, political, economic, and cultural rights under the legal system.”

The Aigi County Club case demonstrates openly that this was a lie.

The case is on appeal. I hope the plaintiff prevails.

(UPDATE: He does. Read the comments to this blog entry.)

ENDS

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The SNA article is at
https://shingetsunewsagency.com/2023/04/24/visible-minorities-judges-strip-equal-protection-from-naturalized-citizens/

The website archiving and substantiating all of the claims above is at
https://www.debito.org/?p=17240

Mainichi & Asahi: Naturalized Zainichi Korean-Japanese sues “Japanese Members Only” Aigi Country Club; court rules denial of golf membership explicitly for being a former foreigner NOT illegal

Posted on April 21, 2023April 24, 2023 by Debito Arudou, Ph.D.

mytest

HI Blog. In a stunning decision, a Japanese court in Mie Prefecture has ruled that a foreigner… excuse me, a JAPANESE CITIZEN who naturalized from being a Zainichi Korean, may be denied membership to a golf course that limits its membership to “Japanese Only”. Including people who are legally Japanese. Including former Zainichi Korean Permanent Residents who have been in Japan for generations.

(NB: This blog entry became a full-blown SNA column on May 24, 2023. Read it here. Evidence for claims in the article, however, is below in this website.)

For the record, this is Aigi Country Club in Gifu Prefecture.
〒509-0238 岐阜県可児市大森1501
TEL 0574-64-1211 (Website here. Plenty of overseas web presence where you can leave reviews of the golf course here.) Photo courtesy of the Asahi Shinbun.

Their case, as stated to the Asahi Shinbun below, is,

“Our club has a quota for foreign nationals and former foreign nationals who have become naturalized Japanese and restricts new memberships. We currently have no vacancies in that quota.”

This denies the privileges and equal protections under the law when you get Japanese citizenship. The court even states that Aigi Country Club’s rules were not illegal as its actions did not violate his human rights beyond “socially acceptable limits.”

Ah yes, that old legal argument. That was used in the Otaru Onsens Case to say that racial discrimination did indeed happen, but the illegal activity wasn’t the racial discrimination itself, but rather “discrimination that went beyond socially acceptable limits.” Some discrimination is acceptable, according to the courts. Here, discrimination for having Korean roots is acceptable in a club. After all, according to the Asahi below,

“private entities like the golf club are guaranteed freedom of association under Article 21 of the Constitution. In principle, such private groups are free to decide the terms and conditions of their memberships.” Especially since it’s an “exclusive and private group,” and playing golf is “not indispensable for social life.”

There’s plenty more below, but let me put this in context about how the Japanese judiciary has been slowly whittling away NJ rights:

The Ana Bortz Case of 1998-1999 found that foreigners were protected by the UN CERD against being turned away at private enterprises open to the public (in this case, a jewelry store), and awarded Bortz 2 million yen (at the time, about $15,000).

The Otaru Onsens Case of 1993-2005 found that foreigners (and one naturalized Japanese citizen) were not allowed to be turned away from a private enterprise (in this case, a public bathhouse), and awarded plaintiffs 1 million yen each. But they did not hold that the UN CERD offered protections, and the Japan Supreme Court also ruled that there were no constitutional protections involved.

The Steve McGowan Case of 2004-2006 found NO protections for his denial from a private enterprise (an eyeglass store), and blamed him for not understanding enough Japanese (even though we had him on tape saying he refused McGowan because he “hates black people”. This was overturned on appeal, but by now the court award was whittled down to only 350,000 yen, not enough to cover his legal fees for the initial lawsuit and appeal.

Now, this Aigi Country Club Case ruling says a) there are no protections for foreigners, b) even if they have Japanese citizenship, c) even if everyone admits the discrimination was nationality/ethnicity-based. It’s not discrimination because golf clubs are designed to be exclusive, by whatever standards they want. It’s “socially acceptable”.

This is a horrible precedent, and completely undermines the Japanese Government’s position that Japan doesn’t need a law against racial discrimination because we have an active judiciary. If there’s a problem, sue, and get legal protections.

“Furthermore, in cases where the rights of the people are infringed, the Court can offer them redress. (Article 32 of the Constitution provides that “no person shall be denied the right of access to the courts.”)… The Constitution of Japan stipulates not only guarantee of being equal as Japanese nationals under the law but also guarantee of equality of all rights as Japanese nationals. Therefore, there is no discrimination at all for civil, political, economic and cultural rights under the legal system.”

Nope. It was a lie all along, and now verifiably so. Debito Arudou, Ph.D.

(NB: This blog entry became a full-blown SNA column on May 24, 2023. Read it here. Evidence for claims in the article, however, is below in this website.)

Referencial articles follow:

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Golf club’s denial of membership to former foreign citizen not illegal: Japan court
April 20, 2023 (Mainichi Japan), courtesy of MMT and Niklas
https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20230420/p2a/00m/0na/008000c

TSU — The Yokkaichi branch of the Tsu District Court on April 19 dismissed a lawsuit filed by a man who said he suffered emotional pain after being denied membership at a country club because he is a former foreign national.

The plaintiff, a man in his 40s, sued the private Aigi Country Club in Kani, Gifu Prefecture, for roughly 3.3 million yen (about $24,400) in compensation for emotional distress.

The court ruled that there was nothing illegal about the club refusing to grant the man membership because of his former citizenship. The plaintiff, a resident of the Mie Prefecture city of Kuwana, plans to appeal.

According to the ruling, the man, a former Korean national who acquired Japanese citizenship in 2018, played at the club with an acquaintance in February 2022 and applied for membership. Later, the club rejected his application, saying, “There is no room in the membership quota for foreign nationals, including former foreign nationals, and you cannot join right now.” The man claimed that the club’s response violated Article 14 of Japan’s Constitution, which stipulates equality under the law.

Presiding Judge Tomomichi Masukawa (with Presiding Judge Kan Hibino reading on his behalf) rejected the club’s claim that “being a former foreign national is not the only reason for refusing membership,” and recognized that the refusal was due to the plaintiff’s former Korean nationality.

However, the judge pointed out that the club is a “closed and private organization with strong personal ties among its members,” as membership requires a referral from two regular members and approval by the board of directors. He concluded that “the degree of infringement on the right to equality cannot be considered to exceed socially acceptable limits in light of the purpose of the Constitution.”

In response, the plaintiff’s attorney Junji Oichi said, “It is very regrettable. It goes against the times.” The man said, “I cannot agree with this at all. Is it acceptable to suffer mental anguish from discrimination if it is within a private organization?”

(Japanese original by Taeko Terahara, Tsu Bureau)

元外国籍で入会拒否、違法性なし　ゴルフ会員権訴訟　津地裁支部
毎日新聞 2023/4/19 18:15
https://mainichi.jp/articles/20230419/k00/00m/040/227000c

元外国籍であることを理由に入会を断られ精神的苦痛を受けたなどとして、三重県桑名市の40代男性が愛岐カントリークラブ（岐阜県可児市）に対し、慰謝料など約330万円の損害賠償を求めた訴訟で、津地裁四日市支部は19日、男性の請求を棄却した。私的団体であるゴルフクラブが元外国籍であることを理由に入会を拒否することに違法性はないと判断した。男性は控訴する方針。

判決によると、元韓国籍で2018年に日本国籍を取得した男性は22年2月、知人と同クラブでプレーし、入会を申し込んだ。その後、クラブ側から「元外国籍を含む外国籍の会員の枠に空きがないためすぐに入会することはできない」として入会を断られた。男性は「法の下の平等」を定めた憲法14条に抵触する、などと主張していた。

判決理由で升川智道裁判長（日比野幹裁判長代読）は、「元外国籍であることが入会拒否の唯一の理由ではない」というクラブ側の主張を退け、入会拒否は元外国籍であることが理由だと認めた。一方で、クラブは会員となるために正会員2人の紹介と理事会の承認を得る必要があるなど「会員同士の人的つながりが強い閉鎖的かつ私的な団体」だと指摘。「平等の権利への侵害の程度は憲法の趣旨に照らし、社会的に許容しうる限界を超えるとは認められない」とした。

原告代理人の尾市淳二弁護士は「非常に残念。時代の流れとも逆行する」と話した。男性は「まったく納得できない。差別を受け精神的苦痛を受けることも私的団体内であれば許されるのか」と述べた。【寺原多恵子】

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Court sides with golf club that rejected man born Korean
THE ASAHI SHIMBUN
April 20, 2023 at 17:04 JST
https://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/14889867
Photo/Illutration: The Yokkaichi branch of the Tsu District Court in Yokkaichi, Mie Prefecture (Asahi Shimbun file photo)

YOKKAICHI, Mie Prefecture–A naturalized Japanese citizen expressed outrage after a court rejected his lawsuit against a golf club that refused his membership because he was not born Japanese.

The Yokkaichi branch of the Tsu District Court on April 19 accepted the argument of the plaintiff in his 40s that the Aigi Country Club in Kani, Gifu Prefecture, had denied his membership application because he used to be ethnic Korean.

The court also said there was room to doubt the reasoning behind the club’s membership rules.

But the court ruled against the plaintiff, saying the golf club’s rules were not illegal, and its actions did not violate his human rights beyond “socially acceptable limits.”

“The ruling is out of step with the times,” said a lawyer for the plaintiff, who lives in Kuwana, Mie Prefecture. “The court should have found it unlawful discrimination.”

The plaintiff, who was born to ethnic Korean parents and obtained Japanese citizenship in 2018, filed the lawsuit in April 2022, demanding 3.3 million yen ($24,000) in compensation.

The man, who runs a cleaning business, argued that the golf club violated Article 14 of the Constitution, which guarantees equality to all people under the law.

The court, however, said private entities like the golf club are guaranteed freedom of association under Article 21 of the Constitution. In principle, such private groups are free to decide the terms and conditions of their memberships, the ruling said.

The court also said legal intervention into the internal affairs of a private group is permitted only in exceptional cases when an individual’s rights are violated beyond socially acceptable limits.

It said the golf club is an “exclusive and private group,” and playing golf is “not indispensable for social life.”

The ruling concluded that the disadvantages suffered by the man as a result of being refused membership did not constitute an “exceptional case.”

The plaintiff said he plans to appeal the ruling because he would otherwise continue to be mistreated as a “former foreign citizen.”

A lawyer representing the golf club said they will thoroughly examine the ruling.

(This article was written by Hiroshi Matsubara and Yusuke Saito.)

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Nationality not the only issue at exclusive golf clubs in Japan
By HWANG CHUL/ Staff Writer
May 10, 2022 at 07:10 JST
Photo/Illutration: The Aigi Country Club in Kani, Gifu Prefecture, seen here on April 14, opened more than half a century ago. (Hwang Chul)
https://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/14608465

Despite being a naturalized Japanese, a man born to ethnic Korean parents was refused membership to an exclusive golf club in Gifu Prefecture on grounds its quota for non-Japanese was full.

When the fortysomething man, who obtained Japanese citizenship in 2018, sought an explanation, a representative of the Aigi Country Club cited his country of origin.

“Our club has a quota for foreign nationals and former foreign nationals who have become naturalized Japanese and restricts new memberships,” she said in a phone call on Feb. 20. “We currently have no vacancies in that quota.”

When he applied for membership, the man, who lives in Kuwana, Mie Prefecture, and runs a cleaning services company, submitted a copy of an extract of his family register which stated he had South Korean citizenship when he was naturalized.

“If only you could accept (our decision),” a director of the club told him three days later in a phone call the man recorded.

In March, the man sent a written notice to the club through his lawyer, demanding an apology and payment of 3 million yen ($23,500) in compensation, contending its denial of membership constituted “groundless discrimination.”

He also requested the Mie Bar Association to address the infringement of his human rights.

The man had agonized for ages before deciding to take Japanese citizenship.

“Shouldn’t I be switching nationalities, not least for my wife and children, as long as I will go on living in Japan?” he asked himself.

WAY THINGS ARE DONE

The Aigi Country Club, based in Kani, Gifu Prefecture, opened in July 1964, making it the fourth of its kind in the prefecture. It has hosted competitions organized by the Japan Golf Association and was the venue of women’s golf events during the National Sports Festival held in Gifu Prefecture in 2012.

Masakatsu Ito, the club’s managing director, told The Asahi Shimbun that the club, with around 1,500 members, has a combined quota of somewhere below 20 for foreign nationals and former foreign nationals who have obtained Japanese citizenship. He said new members are admitted only when vacancies occur in that category.

“We set those rules as a private golf club,” Ito said. “It is said that the atmosphere slightly changes when there are foreigners around. The decision may have been made in that train of thought. It is not easy to offer a clear answer because the rules were introduced a long time ago.”

When asked why those who have obtained Japanese citizenship are includd in the quota for non-Japanese, he said: “That’s how we’ve been doing things. It is our conventional practice, and I hope it will be understood as such.”

Club officials acknowledged that those rules are not written explicitly in the club’s regulations but have been handed down as internal rules.

HARDLY AN ISOLATED CASE

The Korean Chamber of Commerce & Industry in Japan conducted a survey of 1,794 members-only golf clubs around Japan in 1994 to ascertain nationality clauses in membership requirements.

Of the 821 respondents, 170 golf courses said they had certain restrictions, such as limiting eligibility to Japanese nationals.

KCCI officials said no detailed figures are available on the current situation as a similar survey has not been carried out at least since 2010.

An online search for information on golf club memberships shows that many clubs deny memberships to non-Japanese nationals.

“A good number of golf courses still have nationality clauses, and some even restrict membership for naturalized citizens as well,” a sales official of a Tokyo dealer of memberships told The Asahi Shimbun. “They still retain that exclusive mood.”

“Private clubs handle the matter of membership with their respective criteria,” a JGA official said of the membership restrictions for non-Japanese nationals. “The JGA has never taken a position on the nationality clauses of those clubs or other related matters.”

COURT DECISIONS DIVIDED

In March 1995, the Tokyo District Court ruled on a case concerning a Tokyo golf club operating company that denied membership to an ethnic Korean man on grounds of his nationality. The court found that doing so contravened the spirit of Article 14 of the Constitution, which says all people are equal under the law.

“Golf clubs are deemed to be groups of a certain social nature, partly because golf is a leisure activity broadly practiced in Japan and partly because golf club memberships are circulating in the market,” the decision said in part. “It is difficult to say they have total discretion over how they screen their memberships.”

In a separate lawsuit, the Tokyo District Court in May 2001 rejected the claims of an ethnic Korean plaintiff, saying, “It cannot be said that equality rights are violated beyond socially acceptable limits when a golf club, as a private corporation, restricts its membership requirements on grounds of nationality.”

That decision was upheld by the Tokyo High Court in 2002.

But those “socially acceptable limits” are changing, say some industry insiders.

A law was enacted to deal with hate speech, or instigation of discrimination, against specific ethnic or other groups, and there is a growing awareness about human rights of sexual minorities.

“Golf courses are under pressure to deal with human rights issues, which are not limited to matters of nationality,” the manager of a golf club in the Tokai region said.

He said his club, which has been operating for more than four decades, stopped nationality-based screening of its memberships several years ago.

He cited the example of the Kasumigaseki Country Club in Kawagoe, Saitama Prefecture, which was the venue of golf competitions during the Tokyo Olympics last year.

The International Olympic Committee called on the golf club to rectify its rules that denied full memberships to women, which the IOC said went against the Olympic Charter. The rules were eventually changed.

“Changes in the environment surrounding golf clubs, which were symbolized by that case, will likely go on over the years to come,” the manager said.

“In the United States and elsewhere, golf courses that discriminate against people on the basis of race and gender are finding themselves left out of opportunities to host competitions,” noted Ryusuke Kin, a lawyer with the Tokyo Bar Association.

Kin wrote about the golf club membership issue in “Ethnic Koreans in Japan as seen in lawsuits,” a book compiled and edited by the Lawyers Association of Zainichi Koreans.

“It is problematic that many golf clubs in Japan still have rules that deny memberships to non-Japanese nationals across the board,” he said. “What is more, drawing a line among compatriots on grounds of whether they were non-Japanese in the past amounts to an obvious violation of human rights. The golf world needs to rectify that problem.”

ENDS

Kyodo: Kagawa Pref Govt urges hotels not to request foreign residents’ ID. Bravo. Shame it took nearly 20 years to happen.

Posted on March 29, 2023April 13, 2023 by Debito Arudou, Ph.D.

mytest

Hi Blog. I’m breaking my regular busy silence to report on something we’ve been working on for nearly two decades finally reaching fruition:

Getting Japanese hotels to stop racial profiling by running instant Gaijin Card/Passport Checks on customers (including NJ residents) merely because they’re “foreign-looking” — despite ID checks not being required for customers deemed to be “Japanese” on sight by hotel managers.

Finally, after various regional police departments have unlawfully deputized random hotel clerks to act as a de facto branch of the Immigration Agency (with the explicitly illegal threat of refusal of service in the offing), a regional government has cottoned on to the fact that this might be a violation of human rights.

Bravo Kagawa Prefecture. Let’s hope it catches on nationwide. Seems to only take about twenty years for common sense, not to mention legal protections for NJ residents against police bullying, to seep in. Debito Arudou, Ph.D.

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Hotels in western Japan urged not to request foreign residents’ ID

KYODO NEWS – Mar 16, 2023 – Courtesy of ZNM

https://english.kyodonews.net/news/2023/03/5a5206b30e6c-hotels-in-western-japan-urged-not-to-request-foreign-residents-id.html

The government in the western Japan prefecture of Kagawa has called on local hotel operators to stop asking foreign residents for identification when they check in, local officials said Thursday.

Citing a notice issued Monday by the Kagawa prefectural government to hotel operators, the officials said it is “problematic on human rights grounds” to ask foreign residents to show their passport or other forms of ID when checking into a hotel.

Notice issued by the Kagawa prefectural government to hotels and other accommodation businesses advises them that they do not need to request identification from guests who are foreign nationals living in Japan, as seen in this photo taken March 16, 2023 in Osaka. (Kyodo)

The hotel business law requires only foreigners who live outside of Japan to present ID. But hotel receptionists sometimes ask foreigners who live in Japan for ID based on their name or appearance.

“If a guest provides a domestic address, even if their name or other information suggests they are a foreign national, no further confirmation is required,” the notice says.

The notice comes after a case in August last year in which a South Korean woman living in Osaka was asked to show her residence card ahead of a stay at a hotel in Utazu.

An official at the hotel said it has “asked for ID from foreign nationals living in Japan on a voluntary basis.”

Similar cases have emerged at other accommodations across the country, with some even stating on their websites that they will “refuse” guests who do not comply.

“While there may not be any malicious intent behind the requests, they are effectively an infringement of human rights,” a Kagawa prefectural government official said.

Mun Gong Hwi from the Osaka-based nonprofit organization the Multi-Ethnic Human Rights Education Center for Pro-existence said that “changing one’s response based on nationality with no logical reasoning is discrimination. I want to spread the knowledge of Kagawa Prefecture’s approach as a good example.”

Related coverage:

Japan city stumbles over plan to recognize foreigners as citizens

Cabinet approves proposals for Japan immigration law changes

City officials learn easy Japanese as number of foreign residents increases

Document of middling quality courtesy Kyodo News:

My SNA Visible Minorities 43: “Salute to the “Author of Cartels of the Mind’,” an obituary of influential Japan Studies scholar and mentor Ivan Hall (1932-2023)

Posted on February 19, 2023February 19, 2023 by Debito Arudou, Ph.D.

mytest

Hi Blog. My latest SNA column 43 is a tribute to old friend, mentor, and influential scholar Ivan Hall. I blogged about him shortly after he died here. This is a fuller treatment, excerpted. RIP. Debito Arudou, Ph.D.

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Visible Minorities: Salute to the Author of Cartels of the Mind
By Debito Arudou
Shingetsu News Agency, February 20, 2023

SNA (Tokyo) — Ivan Parker Hall, author of landmark book Cartels of the Mind: Japan’s Intellectual Closed Shop, died in Berlin on February 1, 2023, at age 90.

Before I start writing another obituary, please let me pause and talk about our very close relationship: Ivan Hall fundamentally changed my life into an activist researcher in Japanese Studies.

It wasn’t always this way. When I first arrived in Japan during the latter 1980s, I was in fact a cultural relativist. Carefully trained in the non-judgmentalism of the liberal arts, I had the mantra of “Who am I to judge Japan?” It had its own way of doing things, and would get along just fine without one white Western interloper (or even the outside world) telling it what to do. As per my classic Edwin O. Reischauer Ivy League training, Japan was one of those precious “culturally unique” jewels that should just be left to flourish in its own way.

That’s why at first I was a devoted scholar of the “Japanese Way.” After all, Japan must be doing something right. Its people were living the longest in the world. Its economy measured per capita had just surpassed that of Americans. It was buying up major world assets on the strength of the Yen. Our next boss, according to movies such as Back to the Future II, was going to be Japanese.

It took just one stint working for an abusive Japanese trading company–and the bursting of Japan’s asset bubble–to disabuse me of those early notions.

But it wasn’t until I became a Japanese university professor that I saw just how much the Japanese system was wasting talent due to racism. Japanese faculty hired full-time were getting permanent tenure from Day One, while almost all foreign educators (who were often more qualified than their Japanese counterparts) were getting permanent contract work.

Enter Ivan Hall, who summed this situation up most pithily as “Academic Apartheid.”…

Read the rest at the Shingetsu News Agency at https://shingetsunewsagency.com/2023/02/20/visible-minorities-salute-to-the-author-of-cartels-of-the-mind/

My SNA column 41: “Celebrating Christmas as a Compromise” (Dec 27, 2022), about what to do when people say you shouldn’t celebrate regular traditions you hold dear because they’re “not Japanese”

Posted on December 27, 2022December 27, 2022 by Debito Arudou, Ph.D.

mytest

Hi Blog. Let me say it upfront: If you’re celebrating December customs such as Christmas, then I hope you had a Merry (and unobstructed) Christmas and a Happy New Year. If your Christmas was in fact obstructed in some way by people who claim that “Christmas is not Japanese” or “Christmas is something you should outgrow” (as happened to a friend of mine recently), my end-year SNA column is for you:

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Visible Minorities: Celebrating Christmas as a Compromise

SHINGETSU NEWS AGENCY, DEC 27, 2022 by DEBITO ARUDOU in COLUMN

SNA (Tokyo) — A long-term Non-Japanese resident friend, married with a Japanese husband and adult kids, recently told me about a new development in their relationship: Christmas was no longer to be celebrated in their household.

Their children were all grown and didn’t believe in Santa Claus anymore; so no more presents or any big dinner to celebrate the day. They would allow her only a tree.

Why this sudden change of heart? To her surprise, all this time Christmas had been regarded by the family as a nuisance, a cultural imposition on them. Now it was time to grow out of it.

It raises a fundamental issue that someday comes up within any intercultural relationship: How much culture do you give up for the sake of compromise?

I argue that Japan’s “unique” culture narrative (and therefore its lack of commonality with anything “foreign”, by definition) can often create sudden, long-term culture shocks. Because people here can see any accommodation of “foreign” culture as an identity sacrifice, a denial of “Japaneseness”, this can kill relationships, and I offer advice on what to do about it.

Article at https://shingetsunewsagency.com/2022/12/27/visible-minorities-celebrating-christmas-as-a-compromise/

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Thanks for reading! Seasons Greetings to all Debito.org Readers and beyond! Debito Arudou, Ph.D.

My SNA Column 40: Visible Minorities: “Hard to Root for Japan at Sports Events” (Nov 28, 2022), due to all the nasty and racialized attitudes towards our athletes, and the lack of fair play in general

Posted on November 27, 2022November 28, 2022 by Debito Arudou, Ph.D.

mytest

Hi Blog. My latest SNA column was inspired by the World Cup. Intro:

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

Visible Minorities: Hard to Root for Japan at Sports Events

By Debito Arudou, Shingetsu News Agency, November 28, 2022

SNA (Tokyo) — First off, bravo the Japan team for its upset victory over Germany in their first match of the 2022 World Cup!

It was a game where the Samurai Blue showed world-class skill against a lackluster team, and didn’t let the nerves of playing a former world champion get the better of them. Of course, they did lose their next game against Costa Rica, but their achievement against Germany stands.

I want to devote this column to why it’s difficult for me to root for Japan teams in general. It’s not an issue of nationality (since I have that). It’s a matter of how Japan as a society approaches international sports; given the racialized obstacles towards “foreign” participants, a lack of fair play, the unrelenting pressure on our athletes, and media attitudes that oscillate between racial superiority and victimhood, we take all the fun out of it…

Rest at https://shingetsunewsagency.com/2022/11/28/visible-minorities-hard-to-root-for-japan-at-sports-events/

Thanks for reading! Debito Arudou, Ph.D.

My SNA Column 39: Visible Minorities: “Never Forget Japan’s Racist Covid Policies” (Oct 24, 2022), where I ask you to seriously reconsider devoting your life to a place that could revoke your legal status at any time

Posted on October 24, 2022October 24, 2022 by Debito Arudou, Ph.D.

mytest

Visible Minorities: Never Forget Japan’s Racist Covid Policies
SHINGETSU NEWS AGENCY, OCT 24, 2022 by DEBITO ARUDOU in COLUMN
https://shingetsunewsagency.com/2022/10/24/visible-minorities-never-forget-japans-racist-covid-policies/

SNA (Tokyo) — This month Japan finally lifted its Covid restrictions and reopened its borders to tourists. Well, whoop-de-doo.

For now, foreigners will no longer suffer entry caps, or go through extra procedures just because they’re foreign, such as being sequestered in foreigner-only floors of hotels with tour-minders so they don’t wander off and contaminate the rest of Japan.

Never mind that Japanese entrants, barely subjected to these strictures put on foreigners, had all this time predictably infected Japan quite freely.

Remember how this whole thing started back in 2020, when cases were found in Yokohama Port aboard a luxury liner called the Diamond Princess? It soon became mired in Japan’s bureaucratic politics, the ship’s patients counted by no country as part of their Covid case total. This was the bellwether for Japan’s future Covid border policies of incompetence and racism…

Rest at https://shingetsunewsagency.com/2022/10/24/visible-minorities-never-forget-japans-racist-covid-policies/

Debito’s SNA VM37: “Reforming Japan’s Dickensian Foreign Trainee Program,” Aug 22, 2022, and why I remain skeptical that reforms will actually happen

Posted on August 21, 2022 by Debito Arudou, Ph.D.

mytest

Visible Minorities: Reforming Japan’s Dickensian Foreign Trainee Program
August 22, 2022, By Debito Arudou

SNA (Tokyo) — News Item: video footage surfaced in 2020 of a Vietnamese “trainee” being physically abused by Japanese co-workers at a construction company in Okayama Prefecture, resulting in injuries including broken ribs and a broken tooth. Despite a criminal complaint, the Okayama Prefectural Police Prosecutor’s Office declined to prosecute the four Japanese co-workers involved.

Here is the video footage that started it all.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PK1HhnvktOc&t=76s

This Vietnamese trainee is not alone. Despite the strict Covid border controls, currently 280,000 foreigners toil as temporary low-wage workers in Japan’s farms and factories nationwide. Given Japan’s often nasty work environments, which generally combine exploitative work ethics with a normalized bullying culture, this means that more than a quarter of a million foreigners are here and in harm’s way under a system of unfettered abuse…

[…]

Fortunately, there are some stirrings that reforms might happen. Even the conservative Yomiuri Shinbun said in an August 20 editorial that reforming the system is “unavoidable.” Moreover, the government announced last month a full-scale review of the program, intending to “bring this long-standing issue to a historical conclusion.”

I am skeptical these reforms will achieve what is promised, which is basically to resolve the ongoing human rights abuses which have always characterized the trainee system. One reason for my doubts is because…
==================================

Read the rest at https://shingetsunewsagency.com/2022/08/22/visible-minorities-reforming-japans-dickensian-foreign-trainee-program/

Asahi: Okayama public prosecutors drop co-worker violence claim by Vietnamese “Trainee” despite video evidence. No wonder Japan’s violent bully culture thrives! (UPDATE: Out-of-court settlement was reached)

Posted on August 17, 2022August 19, 2022 by Debito Arudou, Ph.D.

mytest

Hi Blog. Here’s a handy site I just found on Facebook (GoEMON Global) that offers news and translation of interest to Debito.org. Something of note (with my comment afterwards):

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

OKAYAMA PREFECTURAL PUBLIC PROSECUTORS OFFICE DECIDES TO NOT CHARGE FOUR JAPANESE PEOPLE WITH THE ALLEGED ASSAULT OF A VIETNAMESE TRAINEE TWO YEARS AGO

Courtesy TT and GoEMON (https://goemon-jp.com/)

Two years ago, a 41-year-old male Vietnamese technical trainee was abused by his four Japanese coworkers while working. The act was then discreetly recorded by another Vietnamese trainee, causing a buzz within the public at that time. The result of the case was recently disclosed by the Okayama Prefectural Public Prosecutors Office.

The technical trainee filed a case to the Okayama Prefectural Public Prosecutors Office, claiming that he had been assaulted during the past two years working at the company, in which the four coworkers, all in their 30s, were referred to prosecution on suspicion of causing injuries and other charges. The Prosecutor’s Office, however, announced that the four cannot be prosecuted, due to a lack of information.

The indictments were dropped against two for injury, one for injury and violation of the Violent Acts Punishment Law, and one for violation of the Violent Acts Punishment Law.

Original article:

ベトナム人実習生暴行容疑で書類送検の4人、不起訴に　岡山区検

朝日新聞　2022年8月4日

https://www.asahi.com/articles/ASQ8466HSQ84PPZB012.html

Video evidence:

Courtesy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PK1HhnvktOc&t=76s

技能実習生のベトナム人男性（41）が実習先の岡山市の建設会社で2年間にわたって暴行を受けたと訴え、岡山県警が同社の元従業員の男性4人（いずれも30代）を傷害などの疑いで書類送検していた事件で、岡山区検は4日、4人全員を不起訴処分とした。理由は明らかにしていない。
不起訴となったのは傷害容疑の2人と、傷害と暴力行為等処罰法違反容疑の1人、暴力行為等処罰法違反容疑の1人。

訴える(うったえる): Prosecute
暴行(ぼうこう): Abuse
不起訴(ふきそ): Cannot be prosecuted
違反容疑(いはんようぎ): Alledged
傷害(しょうがい): Injury
—————————————
GoEMON is a sharing and community connection platform in Japan. We want to build a community to help foreigners have a better life in Japan by sharing the real experiences of foreigners in Japan.
#GoEMON #News

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COMMENT FROM DEBITO: “A lack of information”!? [Well, in the original Japanese, it just says, “For reasons left unclear.”] Anyway, watch the video above. Yet another example (see the McGowan Case for another) of how even when you have photographic or audio evidence of abusive behavior, the laws are only as good as the people enforcing them. If public prosecutors will not do their job and prosecute, the laws specifically against violent acts mean nothing.

Consider this: How many of you out there have been in a situation where the bullying in Japan escalated from verbal to physical? Personally, I have, many times. And it’s no wonder why — as evidenced here, there’s nothing official to stop or hold abusers accountable. This is despite all the public promises of reform of Japan’s already abusive, exploitative, and deadly “Trainee” system. In a sense, this poor guy is lucky he didn’t end up laid up in the hospital or worse! Debito Arudou, PhD

=====

PS: I got out of my bullying situations by fighting back. But that usually had mixed results — too many times in Japan the victim gets blamed for either “overreacting”, or for disrupting things by reacting at all. And it’s one reason why Japan remains a society where bullies dominate. Because who dares, wins. D.

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UPDATE AUGUST 19, 2022: Other media gave more detail that the case was dropped due to a settlement. Article follows, translation mine:

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

ベトナム人技能実習生への暴行事件　建設会社の元従業員4人を不起訴に　岡山区検
YahooNews.co.jp, 2022.8.4(木), courtesy of LP
https://news.yahoo.co.jp/articles/faa361ab11a2bc6d7c7c865e7044a2e57d3eb716

岡山市の建設会社で働いていたベトナム人技能実習生に暴行し、けがをさせたとして書類送検されていた元従業員4人を岡山区検察庁は不起訴処分としました。

この事件は2019年秋に来日したベトナム人技能実習生の男性が、職場の岡山市の建設会社で約2年間、日本人従業員から暴行を受け肋骨を折るなどのけがをしたと訴えていたものです。

2022年6月、岡山県警は傷害などの疑いで当時従業員だった4人を書類送検していました。

岡山区検は不起訴処分とした理由について明らかにしていません。

実習生を保護していた労働組合によりますと、建設会社と監理団体から実習生に謝罪がありその後、解決金が支払われ示談が成立したとしています。ENDS
============================

Translation by Debito:

Violence against a Vietnamese Trainee: Okayama Public Prosecutors decide not to prosecute four former [Japanese] employees at construction company

Yahoo News, August 4, 2022

A case sent to Okayama District Public Prosecutors, where four former [Japanese] employees at an Okayama city construction company were violent towards a Vietnamese Trainee co-worker, causing him injuries, has been dropped from prosecution.

The Vietnamese male Trainee, who had arrived in Japan in the Fall of 2019, reported that over the course of about two years, he had endured violence from Japanese co-workers at an Okayama construction company workplace, including injuries such as broken ribs.

In June 2022, Okayama Police sent the four Japanese workers to prosecutors for injurious damages. Public Prosecutors did not give a reason why they decided not to prosecute.

According to the labor union protecting the Trainee, there was an apology from the construction company and the administering agency (kanji dantai), with restitution (kessaikin) paid through private settlement. ENDS

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FURTHER COMMENT FROM DEBITO: Well, if the “Trainee” feels that honor has been satisfied through apologies and restitution, so be it. And according to this article, his abusers seem to have gotten fired.

But let’s consider how this should have proceeded:

The violence shouldn’t have gone on for two years. There should have been a way to report it to authorities at the first sign of violence, particularly to those authorities who got the “Trainees” here in the first place, and gotten him transferred him out of there immediately.
It shouldn’t have taken the painstaking amount of effort on the part of the victim to make a video and get a labor union involved before authorities sat up and took notice. Even broken ribs wasn’t enough evidence? How many months of everyday hell and pain did this poor “Trainee” have to endure?
The workplace should have been screened better as an acceptable workplace, and then monitored afterwards. This isn’t the first case of foreign “Trainee” or “Researcher” workplace abuse by any stretch. Abuse, according to the labor unions, is in fact the norm. According to labor union leader Torii Ippei, companies that are NOT abuse their foreign workers are “very rare” (goku mare).

This case shows just how much, despite calls for reform of the system for decades, things have NOT progressed. By now, things like this shouldn’t still be happening. But official negligence is the norm here. Again, good thing the “Trainee” had the video of the savage treatment that resulted in broken ribs and untold mental damage. But he shouldn’t have had to. Debito

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Even more detail here (excerpt):

ベトナム人技能実習生への暴行で示談成立　建設会社・監理団体が謝罪
西本秀朝日新聞　2022年5月7日
https://www.asahi.com/articles/ASQ5675PYQ4XPITB003.html

ベトナム国籍の技能実習生の男性（41）が実習先の岡山市の建設会社で2年間にわたって暴行を受けたとし、動画を公表して訴えていた問題で、男性を保護した労働組合・福山ユニオンたんぽぽ（広島県福山市）は、会社や、実習生を仲介した監理団体との間で示談が成立したことを明らかにした。

ユニオンによると、建設会社シックスクリエイトは、暴行があったとし、監理団体の岡山産業技術協同組合は、保護責任を果たせなかったとしてともに男性側に謝罪し、補償金を支払うという。

シックスクリエイトの代理人弁護士は「取材は受けない」とした。監理団体は「示談により問題が円満解決に至った」としつつ、内容は「関係者のプライバシーに関わり、詳細を明らかにすることを差し控えさせていただきます」とコメントした。

国も問題視　計画認定取り消しに
男性は2019年10月に来… rest at https://www.asahi.com/articles/ASQ5675PYQ4XPITB003.html

Japan Times on neighborhood sento bathhouse restoration activists: Omits history of how Japan’s already-declining public bath industry hurt itself with “Japanese Only” signs

Posted on August 12, 2022August 12, 2022 by Debito Arudou, Ph.D.

mytest

Hi Blog. Particularly dear to my heart is the issue of public baths in Japan (onsen and sento), as racist exclusionism is something my friends and I have dealt with for decades (including a successful civil suit in Otaru that went all the way to Japan’s Supreme Court, a couple of books in English and Japanese, and even a doctoral dissertation). Despite all these years of recording their “Japanese Only” signs and activities, already people seem to be trying to forget, or remembering not to remember, how this industry already in decline did itself no favors by being racist.

The most recent example of historical revisionism was in a Japan Times article about “Sento Samaritans”, where it didn’t even mention that past. The article is excerpted below. I wrote in their Comments Section in reply:

======================
Debito: I applaud the efforts of these movements to keep neighborhood sento open. However, the writer of this article (and perhaps the activists themselves) neglected to mention an important part of history, where public/private baths have refused entry to foreign and foreign-looking residents and customers. If offering this communal experience is “an important channel of communication between neighbors”, then it’s also important to recognize the fact that sometimes sento and onsen have undermined themselves by putting up “Japanese Only” signs, and not recognized “foreigners” as fellow neighbors. Openness to all members of the community should also be part of their slogans.
======================

The JT article is excerpted below.

Also, The Japan Times in general seems to be forgetful of this discriminatory history as an editorial policy, as their archive on recent articles regarding Sento demonstrates. The JT laments the decline of the industry (for example, here) without getting into how some of their decline is their own fault. That’s particularly galling, considering I wrote for the Japan Times for two decades a regular column, in addition to other stringer articles, on this very subject.

Seems The Japan Times doesn’t prioritize this type of issue anymore. So much for reporting “in the public interest”. This is how history gets unlearned and eventually repeats itself. Just wait for the next moral panic blamed on “foreigners”, and communal doors to a public service will shut all over again. Even if if drives the excluder out of business. Talking about preservation without including this issue is in fact counterproductive for the industry. Debito Arudou, Ph.D.

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Sentō Samaritans: The fight to save urban bathhouses
Activists believe bathing for a coin means soaking up culture
The Japan Times, August 6, 2022 (excerpt)
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/life/2022/08/06/general/sento-bathhouse-historians/

Dozens of elderly regulars, families with children and young Tokyoites from all over the city strip, shower off and soak.

This was the scene during a scorching weekend in July at Inari-yu, a rejuvenated sentō (public bathhouse) in Kita Ward’s Takinogawa neighborhood. Together in baths ranging from warm to very hot, bathers admired the bright blues and greens of a recently repainted mural of Mount Fuji over their heads.

Built in 1930, Inari-yu is a rare surviving example of the shrine-like miyazukuri architectural style typical of Tokyo’s prewar bathhouses. The main attraction for visitors, though, was the reopening of the century-old nagaya, a type of Edo Period (1603-1867) rowhouse, adjacent to the sentō. Inari-yu’s staff originally lived in this building, but it had been abandoned for decades — until three years ago, when Sento & Neighborhood, a nonprofit that aims to revive historic bathhouses, started working with Inari-yu’s fifth-generation owners to restore the nagaya.

At the inaugural event, Sento & Neighborhood organized activities such as a lecture by an architectural historian, a community breakfast and a neighborhood walking tour. Next to Inari-yu’s entrance, a market with local food vendors added to the colorful and festive atmosphere.

Unmissable for the attendees, of course, was also a visit to the bathhouse. Stepping out of the heat and into Inari-yu’s cool, soothing interior, bathers shed their clothes and their fatigue in the spacious changing rooms with simple wooden decor overlooking a small, outdoor koi pond.

“Bathhouses are a space where I can ground myself,” says Sam Holden, who first found solace in sentō when he was a graduate student in Tokyo.

Holden, who labels himself an urban activist, is a writer, translator and renovation specialist. He founded Sento & Neighborhood together with four associates in 2020 with the idea of “changing historic bathhouses as little as possible but finding a way for them to become sustainable,” Holden explains, hinting at the financial difficulties that many sentō face…

[History of Sentos redacted]

To Holden, visiting bathhouses means exploring the back alleys that embody a deeper layer of Japan’s urban fabric tucked away from busy and anonymous main streets — and one that has been part of Japanese cities for centuries.

“Across the street from the bathhouse you have the liquor shop where the grandpas gather, the vegetable grocer and tofu shop and all sorts of local eateries,” Holden says. “Preserving a bathhouse means not only preserving that building, but this neighborhood network.”

Read the full article at https://www.japantimes.co.jp/life/2022/08/06/general/sento-bathhouse-historians/

Migrant Integration Policy Index rates Japan as “Integration Denied”, and “Critically Unfavorable” in terms of Anti-Discrimination measures. And this is for 2019, before Covid shut Japan’s borders.

Posted on August 4, 2022August 5, 2022 by Debito Arudou, Ph.D.

mytest

Hi Blog. Here’s an interesting website called the Migrant Integration Policy Index (MIPEX, www.mipex.eu). Who are they? According to its website (excerpt, full text here),

The Migrant Integration Policy Index (MIPEX) is a unique tool which measures policies to integrate migrants in countries across six continents, including all EU Member States (including the UK), other European countries (Albania, Iceland, North Macedonia, Moldova, Norway, Serbia, Switzerland, Russia, Turkey and Ukraine), Asian countries (China, India, Indonesia, Israel, Japan, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, United Arab Emirates), North American countries (Canada, Mexico and US), South American countries (Argentina, Brazil, Chile), South Africa, and Australia and New Zealand in Oceania.

Policy indicators have been developed to create a rich, multi-dimensional picture of migrants’ opportunities to participate in society. In the fifth edition (MIPEX 2020), we created a core set of indicators that have been updated for the period 2014-2019 (see Methodology). MIPEX now covers the period 2007-2019. The index is a useful tool to evaluate and compare what governments are doing to promote the integration of migrants in all the countries analysed.

The project informs and engages key policy actors about how to use indicators to improve integration governance and policy effectiveness…

Thus it offers comparatives for how proactive countries are with their immigration policies. It released its rankings for Japan covering the year 2019, in which it concludes (underlined emphases by Debito):

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Conclusions and recommendations

Japan scores 47/100, slightly below the average MIPEX country (49/100) because Japanese policies still refuse to recognise that Japan is a country of immigration. This denial leads to contradictory policies that create as many obstacles as opportunities for foreign nationals. Japan’s approach to integration is categorised as “Immigration without Integration”. While Japan is a leader far ahead of the other countries in this category, its policies still deny basic rights and equal opportunities to newcomers. Foreign nationals can find some ways to settle long-term in Japan. However, Japanese policies only go halfway to guarantee them equal opportunities, (e.g., on health and education), while also denying them several basic rights, most notably protections from discrimination.

Japan needs to invest more on all the three dimensions, especially to guarantee immigrants with the same basic rights as Japanese citizens. The way that governments treat immigrants strongly influences how well immigrants and the public interact and think of each other. Japan’s current policies encourage the public to see immigrants as subordinates and not their neighbours.

Foreign residents in Japan enjoy relatively favourable access to family reunification, permanent residence and the health system. However, foreign nationals and their children still face major obstacles to education, political participation and non-discrimination. Immigrants’ children receive little targeted support in the education system in Japan, similar to the situation of other countries with low number of migrant pupils. Furthermore, potential victims of ethnic, racial, religious or nationality discrimination have little chance to access justice in Japan. Japan is one of the only MIPEX countries still without a dedicated anti-discrimination law and body. Japan is the among bottom three countries for anti-discrimination policies, together with other ‘immigration without integration’ countries.

Japan’s approach is slightly ahead of poorer Central European countries with equally small and new immigrant populations, but far behind other developed countries, including Korea. In comparison to neighbouring Korea, foreign nationals in Japan face weaker integration policies in the labour market, education, political participation, and anti-discrimination. Besides Korea, Japan’s policies are most similar on MIPEX to Israel and stronger than the other MIPEX Asian countries (China, India and Indonesia).

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For those who succumb to TL;dr, MIPEX provides solid visuals (https://www.mipex.eu/japan):

COMMENT: It’s as we’ve been saying here on Debito.org for decades: This is what happens when you are the only developed country without a national law against racial discrimination. And remember, this is the report as of 2019. I look forward to seeing the next report, where it takes into account Japan’s racist policy of closed borders (even to lawful and Permanent Residents, for a time) due to Covid. I strongly doubt Japan’s numbers will improve. Debito Arudou, Ph.D.

Ministry of Foreign Affairs sets up “foreign media policing website” where anyone can report to J govt any foreign info “incompatible with our country’s standpoint”. Actually, quite within character.

Posted on July 24, 2022July 25, 2022 by Debito Arudou, Ph.D.

mytest

Hi Blog. Here’s something for the undergraduates taking classes on critical thinking and government censorship to write a midterm essay on:

Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs has put up a website that enables anyone to submit to the government “information about any accounts in overseas [media] relating to our country that is based on misunderstandings of the truth/facts (jijitsu), or is incompatible with our country’s standpoint.”

https://www.mofa.go.jp/mofaj/p_pd/pds/page22_003885.html

Here are some essay writing prompts. Discuss:

Why is the Japanese government, particularly the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, getting involved in policing foreign media? Are they the new international media police?
Why is there an assumption that “our country” has a defined “standpoint” that uniformly faces the rest of the world? And whose “truth” is this?
Where did the line-item budget come from to pay these MOFA bureaucrats to act as the media police? Don’t they have enough on their plate already managing, y’know, our country’s diplomacy?

Actually, I might be able to answer the third one. There’s a political dimension to all this. Check out this tweet from SNA on Dietmember Onoda Kimi:

Yeah, we’ve talked about Onoda Kimi before. She’s the American-born former dual-national American-Japanese MP who advocates for antiforeigner public policy that would go against her foreign father’s interests. As I wrote for SNA back in 2020:

You can see how deep the pathology runs in Kimi Onoda, LDP Upper House Diet Member from Okayama. She similarly insinuated on March 30 that government subsidies should be denied Non-Japanese residents. But this is stunningly ironic because she was born in America to an American father. She even held American nationality until 2016 (when she was ratted out and gave it up), meaning she too was a foreigner in Japan.

That’s how deep Japan’s dehumanizing antibodies run — where even a self-hating haafu would effectively deny equal treatment to her own father! What immense psychological scars from childhood bullying have prompted her to deny any ties to her minority origins, and to pander for the approval of majority whim that Non-Japanese Residents belong on a separate and unequal tier in society?

If we ever meet, one question I’d like to ask is, “Who hurt you?”

Anyway, good job, Onoda Kimi. Mission accomplished.

Actually, what MOFA is doing is very much within the Japanese Government (GOJ)’s character anyway. The GOJ is very sensitive to how they are perceived abroad, historically stepping in many times to “correct misperceptions” in foreign media. See here, here, here, here, here, and here, for example. (And it’s a stark contrast to, for example, the Americans, who ignore outright disinformation even when it affects their own citizens abroad.)

Granted, compared to the US’s negligence (even making outright threats against their US citizens for not ignoring racial discrimination in Japan), I’d rather that a government step in to correct public misperceptions when their citizens abroad stand to get hurt. But I’m also suspicious of the GOJ’s motives, as evidenced by the links above, as their “standpoint” towards historical and “factual” interpretation is riddled with ahistorical revisionism.

Moreover, asking for the public’s participation like this is redolent of the “Snitch Sites” the Immigration Bureau deployed in 2004, so that anyone could anonymously sicc the GOJ on any foreigner they thought could be an “illegal” — much to the delight of all the Zainichi Korean haters out there.

In sum, this “MOFA foreign media policing site” is yet another politically-motivated government-sponsored website that is encouraging online abuse and feeding the trolls. Debito Arudou, Ph.D.

My SNA Visible Minorities 36: “Abe’s Assassination and the Revenge of History” (July 18, 2022), on how his historical revisionism created a blind spot that ultimately killed him

Posted on July 18, 2022June 22, 2023 by Debito Arudou, Ph.D.

mytest

Hi Blog. After the Abe Assassination, people have been asking me what I think about it. In short, I think Abe’s historical revisionism is what got him killed. Opening of my latest SNA column 35:

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Abe’s Assassination and the Revenge of History

By Debito Arudou, Shingetsu News Agency, July 18, 2022

https://shingetsunewsagency.com/2022/07/18/visible-minorities-abes-assassination-and-the-revenge-of-history/

SNA (Tokyo) — The assassination of former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has occasioned a lot of valuable, eye-opening discussions in the media, but few if any have focused upon how Abe’s death could be seen as a form of karmic payback–-what happens when you ignore the lessons of history in the pursuit of raw political power.

The discussions have instead focused on the veneer of Japan’s “safe” society being blown away by a homemade gun; or about how the world’s democracies have been deprived of a Japanese leader comfortable on the international stage (while egregiously overlooking all the damage he did to Japan’s democracy).

A few intrepid journalists (starting with the SNA) have explored the swamp of Abe’s political connections with the “Moonies” religious cult, and how that probably gave motive to the killer.

To me the most absurd debate has been whether Abe’s death was an “assassination” at all –- the Japanese media have uniformly refused to use the corresponding word ansatsu, portraying it as merely a “shooting event” (jugeki jiken).

These important topics have been covered elsewhere by people with more expertise, so this column will take a different tack. It will discuss the role of national narratives in a society, how dishonest national narratives stunt the maturity of societies, and how a willful ignorance of history due to these national narratives circled back to kill Abe.

First, let’s talk about what national narratives are: stories created by governments, education systems, and media that unify people within a nation-state. For example, Japan sees itself as a pure-blooded monoethnic society that can be mobilized under shared collective goals to accomplish political and economic miracles. On the other hand, the United States sees itself as a “melting pot” of immigrants and cultures whose harnessed diversity has made it the richest, most powerful nation in the world. And so on.

Accurate or not, all societies create national narratives as a matter of necessity. They tell us what we as a group believe and share as collective history. Without them, policymakers would have great difficulty getting disparate people to obey social norms and laws, or accept their status as a member of society. When people believe that they share a history, starting with national education from childhood, political “legitimacy” can be entrenched. You really know it has worked when someone “loves” their country so deeply that they’ll die for it.

But there’s a problem endemic to creating a shared history–you have to decide who’s a member of society and who’s not. Narratives that unify also must exclude. You can’t have an “in-group” without the existence of an “out-group” to contrast yourself with. You can’t have “citizens” without also having “foreigners.”

Sooner or later even the most well-intentioned people make mistakes that turn people against each other, privileging some people at the cost of others, disenfranchising and even killing in the name of national integrity.

So from that comes two types of history: a “good” one that is celebrated, and a “bad” one that people generally don’t want to talk about.

Consider a few examples of the latter:

When the European powers of the world were colonizing other lands, they soon discovered they couldn’t extract treasure without exterminating local peoples. Consider Christopher Columbus in the Caribbean.

Or as the United States grew and developed, “Manifest Destiny” wielded an unspeakable impact on Native Americans–and that’s before we mention the horrors of chattel slavery.

Japan too didn’t secure its borders without committing cultural genocide against the Ainu and Ryukyuans. There was also that brief episode in the last century when it decided to “liberate” Asians abroad under the auspices of a racist Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.

The point is that every country has a dark side, and any honest historical accounting would allow for that.

Unfortunately, most countries would rather see themselves as the “good guys” in their own narrative, and either downplay or ignore the atrocities committed in the name of the nation.

That’s a bad idea for a number of reasons: not only because it produces poor public policy that leaves past injustices and grievances unresolved, but also because it leaves people blind to the more genuine lessons of history.

For example, the American tendency to see the US Civil War as merely a good-spirited contest between North and South economic and cultural needs overlooks the fact that owning people as property was the central cause of the war. And yet, narratives are still circulating in the South that downplay slavery and its impact.

Why do you think there’s so much backlash these days towards Critical Race Theory, which highlights the legacy of unequal racialized treatment still embedded within current legal systems and narratives? It is because many people would rather just pretend these issues are all settled.

Similarly, why do you think there’s so much backlash in Japan to teaching about atrocities like the Unit 731 biological warfare, the Nanjing Massacre, the brutal colonization of Korea and China, or the government-sponsored sexual slavery of the Comfort Women? It is because some would prefer to pretend that it never happened.

This is where Abe comes in–he was deeply committed to historical revisionism, asserting that Japan was a victim (not an aggressor) in the Pacific War, no more guilty of wrongdoing than any other great power. He also wanted to remove many of the “Western” elements (such as civil rights and individual liberties) that had been enshrined in Japan’s “Peace Constitution” to prevent a recurrence of Japan’s past militarism.

For people like Abe, a national narrative depicting Japan as the “bad guys” would force Japanese to feel shame about their country and to “love” it less. That’s the rubric behind his enforced patriotism and revised compulsory education curriculums.

It was an immature approach which forestalls ever coming to terms with and learning from the past.

Some other countries are more mature about it. Germany, for example, has accepted that its inexcusable historical deeds are just that–inexcusable–and contemporary Germans are taught as such.

There’s no denying that Nazi Germany was one of the worst political systems that ever existed. German schoolchildren are rightly taught to “Beware the Beginnings” (Wehret den Anfängen); that is, to be vigilant against something similar ever happening again.

South Africa has done something similar with its Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Canada is finally coming to grips with its genocidal Indian Residential School System. And so on. Some societies acknowledge a portion of their dark past and try to move forward on a healthier basis.

On the other hand, societies with dishonest historical narratives wind up stuck in the past, continuously refighting and relitigating old battles. Remember what George Santayana said about people not learning from history? They’re doomed to repeat it.

Was American mob violence against the US Capitol on January 6 something entirely new? In fact, this sort of thing happened in city and state legislatures many times in the past. Have you ever heard of the Meridian Race Riot of 1871, the Battle of Liberty Place in 1874, the South Carolina Race Riots of 1876, and the Wilmington Insurrection of 1898? Probably not, and that’s the point. If you don’t know about them, it’s like they never happened.

These and many other incidents evicted anti-slavery politicians from elected offices in the South, established Jim Crow laws for nearly a century, and created the longstanding ahistorical narratives that pervade some elements of Trumpist politics to this day.

In other words, the Capitol insurrection was in fact a repeat from a historical blueprint..

Likewise, the Abe assassination was, in the longer view of history, not unique. Mark Schreiber recently offered a “guided historical tour” in the Asia Times on the long list of political killings in Tokyo alone, calling it “practically routine” in times that are not so distant from our own.

But such history was so suppressed in favor of “safe Japan” narratives that Abe himself scoffed at the need for additional security around public political events. During a 2015 Diet floor session, Abe officiously dismissed a question from MP Kiyomi Tsujimoto about the possibility of domestic terrorism, sniping that it was an attempt to “denigrate Japan.”

That was one of the historical blind spots that got Abe killed.

Even now the narrative of “safe Japan” is reasserting itself. The Japanese media still won’t accurately portray Abe’s killing as an “assassination.” Yet, as the Japan Times noted, similar political killings are freely portrayed as ansatsu–as long as they happen overseas.

Why? Apparently because, in Japan, assassinations are somehow “historically unexpected.”

Even the excuse that Abe’s killing was not “political” is inaccurate. This was not a random murder. As reported in various media, the killer wanted to retaliate because his family had been financially crippled by the Moonies, and specifically targeted Abe for his connections to them. That sounds political to me. Yet the Japanese media initially tried to suppress Abe’s Moonie connection until SNA and social media commentators broke the story.

Societies that stunt growth with “love-of-country-at-all-costs” narratives do themselves an enormous disservice, and not just because it leads to things like politics through violence.

Japan is still stuck in other hackneyed feedback loops: that it has always been a monoethnic society without actual minorities (it has ethnically cleansed itself numerous times); that it never actually lost the Pacific War (using the term shusen–war’s end–instead of haisen, war defeat) in historical accounts; and that Japan is not responsible for past militarism, much to the aggravation of nearby countries. These are counterproductive to Japan’s present and future.

Ahistoricity also keeps Japan from facing one more essential fact it has known for decades–that it is an aging, stagnating society, facing senescence and insolvency within a generation or two unless it allows immigration. To move forward, it needs to adopt more inclusive narratives.

That means coming to terms with, and teaching, the dark side of its history. The senseless death of Abe, who was the most prominent proponent of head-in-the-sand nationalism in postwar Japan, is a good opportunity for a reevaluation.

Otherwise history will continue to exact its revenge.

Tokyo Musashino City fails to get local referenda voting rights for its NJ Residents (Dec 2021). Absorb the arguments of the national-level xenophobic campaign against it.

Posted on July 6, 2022July 7, 2022 by Debito Arudou, Ph.D.

mytest

Hi Blog. Sorry to be getting to this issue so late, but here’s yet another example of a local government, a suburb of Tokyo called Musashino, trying to do what’s right for ALL of its residents (including those without Japanese citizenship) by getting their voice heard by voting in local referenda.

To stress: These are votes on local, repeat, local referenda (they’re not actually *electing representatives*) — and the results are not even legally binding. Moreover, according to the Takao source below, 73% of the public supported the move (that is, before the xenophobes and alarmists stepped in on a national level to bully and scare the public).

Witness the typical alarmism behind sharing any political power in Japan. The tactic is simple: portray the granting of any voice in governance to non-citizens as a security issue. The assumption then becomes that enfranchised foreigners will inevitably use their power to hurt Japanese citizens.

(See other examples on Debito.org of local governments trying to help their foreign residents — since the national government refuses to — and their successes and failures here and here.)

Substantiating articles follow. Trace the arguments pro and con within and see what I mean. The article from the right-wing rag Japan Forward is of particular notice, reprinting the right-wing Sankei Shinbun’s blatant xenophobic editorial policies; as always it gives us a distillation of intellectualized racism. An academic article as counterweight to the Sankei follows that. A quote of note:

Takao: “This backlash [to the Musashino policy proposal] highlights the LDP’s intention to allow more foreign workers to stay in Japan — to address labour shortages — while also suppressing their rights to maintain the image of a ‘homogeneous’ nation. The Japan International Cooperation Agency has indicated that Japan will need to quadruple the number of foreign workers to over 6 million by 2040 to sustain economic growth.

“But the civic and political participation of foreign residents in Japan is necessary for the sake of smooth social integration. Despite conservative protests, it is local authorities who are forced to step up, fill the vacuum and cope with the increasing pressure of foreign workers’ needs, which are not well addressed by the national government. Prospects for the further protection of foreign residents’ rights in Japan will hinge on effective policy coordination and leadership at the local level.”

For the record. Debito Arudou, Ph.D.

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Musashino’s foreign vote plan squeaks through assembly panel
THE ASAHI SHIMBUN, December 14, 2021
https://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/14501973

A Musashino city assembly committee on Dec. 13 narrowly approved a proposal to allow short-term foreign residents to vote in local referendums, an issue that has divided this western Tokyo suburb.

The six members of the general affairs committee were evenly split on the plan. The committee chair then cast a ‘yes’ vote to break the tie.

The proposal will be sent to the city assembly’s floor for a vote on Dec. 21.

If approved by the assembly, Musashino will become the third municipality to allow foreign residents listed in a city’s registration system for three straight months to vote in local referendums, following Zushi in Kanagawa Prefecture and Toyonaka in Osaka Prefecture.

The 108-seat public gallery at the assembly chamber was nearly full by the time discussions started just after 10:30 a.m. The talks continued until 8:30 p.m., with a rest break included.

Under the proposal, residents, including foreign nationals, who are at least 18 years old and have been listed in the city’s basic resident registration system for three straight months can vote in local referendums.

The main issue of dispute at the committee was the three-month requirement for foreign residents.

Two committee members belonging to a Liberal Democratic Party group of the city assembly strongly opposed the proposal.

“From a commonsense perspective, it is nonsense to treat people who have lived in Japan for a long time and foreigners who have only stayed in Japan for three months at the same level,” said one of the opposing members, Taro Kikuchi.

Kikuchi also pointed out that the COVID-19 pandemic has limited the opportunities for residents to hear the city’s explanation of the issue.

The proposal “is controversial and has divided the city in half,” he said.

Hidenori Dojo, another opponent, warned that the proposal could give short-term foreign residents a say on national security issues or energy policies in a public referendum.

The city’s public referendum ordinance proposal “is in a broad sense an enfranchisement,” Dojo said.

He explained that his stance is not about “excluding and discriminating against foreigners” but he believes “a distinction is necessary.”

A representative of the city government countered Dojo’s argument.

“It is not appropriate to prohibit a resident’s will to express a certain opinion on a matter even if the city does not have jurisdiction over that matter,” the representative said.

Shori Ochiai, the third opponent of the proposal who belongs to junior coalition partner Komeito, said various opinions were expressed over the issue of granting voting rights to foreigners when the basic autonomy ordinance was established to promote decentralization.

Ochiai said those discussions went nowhere.

He also questioned the timing of Musashino city’s proposal.

He noted that the city started designing institutional arrangements for public referendums after the basic autonomy ordinance took effect in 2020.

“Residents have since struggled in their daily lives during the COVID-19 pandemic. And now, with all this hubbub, many of them are wondering for the first time, ‘What is going on?’”

A city representative acknowledged the need to pass more information about the ordinance to residents.

The three committee members who voted in favor of the proposal included a member of the Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan and a member of the Japanese Communist Party.

They spent much of their time asking the city questions about how it can ease concerns about possible ramifications from granting voting rights to foreign nationals in referendums.

Taro Yabuhara, the CDP member, asked about the processes that Zushi and Toyonaka went through to establish systems that allowed voting by foreign nationals listed in the basic resident registration system for at least three months.

A Musashino representative said both cities did not face exceptional opposition to their plans from residents or assembly members, and the municipalities also did not see a sudden increase in foreign resident numbers.

Some xenophobic groups have argued that Musashino’s ordinance would result in an influx of special-interest foreign nationals seeking a say in Japanese policies.

But a Musashino official said that such an attempt would be unsuccessful “in a city with a high population density.”

Natsuki Sakurai, an independent politician on the committee, said of such criticism: “Residents of foreign nationalities are shared members of the community. I feel uncomfortable with discussions on whether they are suitable for acceptance in this community or not.”

Sakurai also asked Musashino officials if there are any administrative services that are limited to people with Japanese nationality, a requirement for voting in mayoral and city assembly elections.

“There is no distinction by nationality in terms of services,” a city representative said.

Shigeki Hashimoto, the JCP member, said statements made by city assembly members who oppose the proposal as well as certain media “have misled citizens” by saying that the right to vote in public referendums “is practically a right to vote in local elections.”

A city official agreed with Hashimoto, saying, “Public referendums are close to petitions, defined under Article 16 of the Constitution, and this is different from local election voting rights.”

Ultimately, Tatsuya Fukazawa, a CDP member who chairs the committee, voted for the proposal, making it a 4-to-3 win for the city.

The committee also rejected a petition with 5,277 signatures asking that the proposal be scrapped or tabled for further discussions.

Munenori Kaneko, who heads a group that organized the petition, said about 70 percent of the signatories live in Musashino.

The group has argued that granting foreign residents the right to vote could result in the adoption of opinions that are different from those of the electoral constituencies.

“It can lead to a decline in the functions of the city assembly, whose members are elected by residents with Japanese nationality,” the group said.

(This article was written by Keiichiro Inoue and Atsushi Takahashi.) ENDS

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Tokyo’s Musashino rejects proposal to let foreign residents vote
Kyodo News/Japan Times, Dec 21, 2021
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2021/12/21/national/politics-diplomacy/tokyo-musashino-rejects-foreign-residents-vote/

The municipal assembly of Musashino in Tokyo on Tuesday rejected a proposed ordinance that would have allowed foreign residents to vote in local referendums.

When first submitted, the proposal divided opinions in the assembly of the suburban city with a population of nearly 150,000. It also drew flak online, with critics saying it could be a step toward granting foreign residents the right to vote in national elections.

The city, which has the popular shopping and residential district of Kichijoji, failed to join two cities that have granted voting rights to foreign nationals in referendums without special conditions — Zushi in Kanagawa Prefecture and Toyonaka in Osaka Prefecture.

The proposal was voted down by 14 to 11.

Following the assembly vote on Tuesday, Musashino Mayor Reiko Matsushita said spreading information about the proposal to residents in the city was insufficient, adding that she will listen to citizens’ voices and consider submitting a revised proposal in the future.

The city assembly’s general affairs committee gave the green light to the controversial proposal last week.

Matsushita submitted the proposal to the assembly in November for holding referendums that would have allowed foreign nationals age 18 or above to vote if they have lived in the city for at least three months — the same conditions that would apply to Japanese residents.

“I am aiming to create a city that accepts diversity,” Matsushita said during the committee’s deliberations last week. “Those who have just come to Japan are also part of the community.”

Assembly members with ties to the Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan supported the proposal, while members associated with the Liberal Democratic Party opposed it, with one arguing the plan had been hastily decided.

“Explanations to citizens have been insufficient,” the LDP assembly member said.

Other than the cities of Zushi and Toyonaka, about 40 municipalities in Japan allow foreign nationals to vote in referendums, but with some conditions applied such as having the status of permanent residency. ENDS

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Musashino assembly rejects proposal to let foreigners vote
THE ASAHI SHIMBUN, December 21, 2021
https://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/14507138

The Musashino municipal assembly in western Tokyo on Dec. 21 rejected the city’s proposal to allow foreign nationals, including short-term residents, to vote in local referendums.

Fourteen assembly members voted against the proposal while 11 were in favor.

The issue has divided the city.

Proponents said the plan would lead to a more diverse society and gives a voice to more people living in the city.

But critics argued that the required period of stay in the city was far too short for the right to vote. They also said information about the proposal had not been effectively distributed to the public.

The proposal said those eligible to vote in public referendums must be 18 years old or older and listed in the city’s basic resident register network system for at least three straight months.

The plan included foreign students and technical trainees.

“I have seriously taken the result of the vote to heart,” Musashino Mayor Reiko Matsushita said at a news conference after her proposal was rejected.

“I have listened to various opinions from the assembly and residents,” she said. “But I have noted that (such an effort) is not enough, and the issue needs more publicity before we can implement a public referendum system.”

Matsushita also addressed criticism of the three-month-stay requirement and indicated that she will submit another proposal after a review.

“There are voices that say certain conditions are needed, such as the length of stay or a permanent resident status,” she said. “I want to think about that together from now on and find a better way.”

In an earlier vote on Dec. 13, the city assembly’s six-member general affairs committee was evenly split on the proposal. The committee chair tipped the scale by voting “yes,” sending the proposal to a full vote from the assembly.

After the city announced the proposal in November, Diet members of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party and others voiced opposition. Some argued that such a plan “will grant quasi-voting rights to foreigners without any careful consideration.”

Xenophobic groups have also rallied in the city’s downtown area and around city hall, using a propaganda vehicle to blare out their opposition.

Supporters of the proposal said of such rallies, “Coercive promotions and extortion-like behavior have been prevalent.”

(This article was written by Keiichiro Inoue and Atsushi Takahashi.) ENDS

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EDITORIAL | Musashino City Council Did the Right Thing in Rejecting Foreigner Voting

Under the now-rejected ordinance, non-Japanese living in the city for only three months could have voted, raising fears of foreign influence on local decisions impacting national security.

December 28, 2021 By Editorial Board, The Sankei Shimbun
https://japan-forward.com/editorial-musashino-city-council-did-the-right-thing-in-rejecting-foreigner-voting/

A draft ordinance that would have allowed voting on local referendums without distinguishing between foreign residents and Japanese nationals was voted down in a plenary session of the Musashino City Council in western Tokyo on December 21, 2021.

The city council has shown good judgment, and we applaud the decision. If the proposed ordinance had been approved, its ripple effect could have spread to other municipalities.

Local referendums have the potential for exerting influence over issues affecting the national interest, such as national security and energy policy. In light of the gravity of the matter, it is only natural that the city council has rejected the draft ordinance. The city government of Musashino, which proposed the ordinance, must take the outcome to heart.

The ordinance would have granted foreign residents, such as students and technical intern trainees, the right to vote in referendums if they have lived in the city for three months or more, and are at least 18 years old. The council’s general affairs committee passed the city government-sponsored ordinance on December 13. Pros and cons of the draft were debated before the proposed ordinance was brought to a vote on December 21, with arguments divided on points such as whether it would “boost diversity” in Musashino, and the “need for certain standards” before voting. The outcome was that the proposed ordinance was rejected by a majority vote.

After the vote, Musashino Mayor Reiko Matsushita stated, “There was a view that the city government had done an inadequate job of informing citizens about the ordinance,” suggesting that she might push for its consideration again. The mayor, however, should abandon any such effort.

Although the mayor insisted that referendums voted on by residents would not be legally binding, the bill explicitly said, “Both the city council and the mayor should respect the result.” If the mayor and council look to the vote for guidance, fears that the referendum could impact the political decision making process would be realized, and non-Japanese would have acquired suffrage.

Fears arose of the city administration and council being swayed by the results of such referendums, impacting political decision making and ending in the foreigners acquiring voting rights.

Seventy-eight municipalities across the country have adopted ordinances on holding local referendums. Of those, 43 have granted voting rights to foreign residents. Unlike Musashino City, however, most have clear stipulations on who can participate in voting, such as limiting eligibility only to non-citizens with permanent resident status.

In its 1995 ruling, the Supreme Court declared that enfranchisement of foreign residents was not permitted under the Constitution. But at the same time the court acknowledged that voting at a local level should be allowed by “those having particularly close relationships with local entities.” The court also set limitations, such as permanent foreign residents of the city.

The Supreme Court decision did not pave the way for voting by foreign nationals, such as students and technical intern trainees who have lived in a city for only three months.

Some pointed out that there have been no particular problems with similar ordinances to the one proposed in Musashino, such as a 2006 ordinance in Zushi, Kanagawa Prefecture. In another case, however, a 1998 referendum in Okinawa Prefecture on the Japan-US Status of Forces Agreement shook national security politics.

Moreover, there can be no guarantee that these ordinances will be non-problematic in the future simply because there have been no major problems so far.

Musashino City should instead place top priority on improving its own efforts to meet the diverse needs of its foreign residents. It could start, for instance, by increasing the number of services which offer access to interpreters. ENDS

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Civic rights for foreign residents sparks backlash in Japan
East Asia Forum, 12 February 2022
By Yasuo Takao, Curtin University
https://www.eastasiaforum.org/2022/02/12/civic-rights-for-foreign-residents-sparks-backlash-in-japan/

The number of foreign residents living in Japan has dramatically increased in the past decade, marking a change for a population traditionally perceived as ‘homogenous’. One local municipality’s debate on civic participation for its foreign residents recently sparked a nation-wide backlash from conservatives and nationalists.

The inflow of foreign residents into Japan increased from 287,100 in 2010 to 592,000 in 2019 — the fourth largest inflow in the OECD. As of October 2021, there were 2.8 million residents of foreign nationality registered in the country.

The debate on how to integrate these new residents into Japanese society is ongoing. By the end of 2021, 42 of Japan’s 1718 municipalities (excluding Tokyo’s Special Wards) had passed public ordinances establishing permanent local referendum systems and granted foreign residents voting rights in them. Zushi in Kanagawa prefecture and Toyonaka in Osaka prefecture even permitted foreign residents to vote without any special ‘period of stay’ conditions.

But in December 2021, the city assembly of Musashino in suburban Tokyo voted against (14 to 11) an ordinance that would have granted foreign residents such voting rights. Progressive Mayor Reiko Matsushita had proposed establishing a permanent local referendum system that would include foreign residents aged 18 or older who had been on the residential register for at least three months. While the referendum results would not be legally binding, the ordinance would require the mayor and the assembly to ‘respect’ them.

In March 2021, Musashino conducted a survey which found 73.2 per cent of respondents agreed that foreign residents should be able to vote in local referendums. Prior to the vote, the city was divided — a backlash from conservative and nationalist politicians and newspapers resulted in street protests against the proposal, while many grassroots community groups were supportive. Voting rights for foreigners had not been an issue in the national lower house election in October 2021, yet Musashino’s proposal gained the attention of the conservative mass media and soon became an issue of national import.

So, how did this whole controversy come about? The issue of non-citizen voting has its roots in the broader policy of local autonomy for Japan’s municipalities.

Ongoing decentralisation in favour of local councils was a key part of public sector reforms in the 1990s, and the Omnibus Law for Local Devolution came into force in 2000. This saw the first local autonomy ordinance (jichi kihon jorei) established in Niseko in 2001, and by 2012 there were 284 such laws — which are known as the ‘constitutions of municipalities’.

The dynamic changed in 2012 when national elections returned the old guard Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) to power. In 2014 the LDP directed its local branches to ‘respond carefully’ to any initiatives for the enactment of basic local autonomy ordinances. In particular, the LDP Policy Affairs Research Council warned some discretionary power of local authorities went ‘too far’ beyond Japan’s constitutional framework. Consequently, the number of new ordinances dropped from 25 in 2014 to one in 2020.

After a basic local autonomy ordinance came into force, municipalities — including Musashino — regularly started making institutional arrangements for inclusive public referendums. Most proposals for the participation of foreign residents in local referendums were based on these laws.

While some local ordinances followed national guidelines released by the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, local authorities also drafted many on their own. The LDP tried to break this momentum by arguing ‘jichi kihon jorei represents a denial of the nation’.

In this political climate, Musashino’s proposal was singled out for attack by conservative groups. A group of LDP nationalist politicians, led by Seiichiro Murakami and Shigeharu Aoyama, warned that foreign residents’ rights to vote in referendums could undermine Japan’s national security as the agenda items for referendums are virtually unlimited. In opposing the city’s proposal, Murakami and Aoyama argued it ‘would lead to easily granting foreign nationals rights equivalent to suffrage’. Subsequently, 14 Musashino council members heeded these conservative attacks and voted against the proposal.

This backlash highlights the LDP’s intention to allow more foreign workers to stay in Japan — to address labour shortages — while also suppressing their rights to maintain the image of a ‘homogeneous’ nation. The Japan International Cooperation Agency has indicated that Japan will need to quadruple the number of foreign workers to over 6 million by 2040 to sustain economic growth.

But the civic and political participation of foreign residents in Japan is necessary for the sake of smooth social integration. Despite conservative protests, it is local authorities who are forced to step up, fill the vacuum and cope with the increasing pressure of foreign workers’ needs, which are not well addressed by the national government. Prospects for the further protection of foreign residents’ rights in Japan will hinge on effective policy coordination and leadership at the local level.

Yasuo Takao is Adjunct Senior Research Fellow at the School of Media, Culture and Creative Arts, Curtin University, Perth. ENDS

More articles and opinion on the subject at https://www.google.com/search?q=musashino+foreigners+voting

My SNA VM35: “Visible Minorities: Torture and Murder in Japan Detention Centers” (June 20, 2022) including the Sandamali, Suraj, Fernando, Okafor, Ekei etc. Cases.

Posted on June 20, 2022June 20, 2022 by Debito Arudou, Ph.D.

mytest

Visible Minorities: Torture and Murder in Japan Detention Centers
Shingetsu News Agency, June 20, 2022, by Debito Arudou

https://shingetsunewsagency.com/2022/06/20/visible-minorities-torture-and-murder-in-japan-detention-centers/

SNA (Tokyo) — News Headline: “Prosecutors drop case over death of detained Sri Lankan woman.”

In August 2020, a Sri Lanka national named Ratnayake Liyanage Wishma Sandamali was arrested for overstaying her visa, and detained in a Nagoya Immigration Detention Center. She had arrived in Japan in 2017, but her student visa was cancelled in 2019 because she couldn’t afford tuition fees. While in detention, she opted not to return to Sri Lanka, reportedly due to reduced flights during Covid and an abusive boyfriend back home.

During her seven months in custody, however, Sandamali’s health steadily declined due to a stress-induced stomach condition. According to the Straits Times, Sandamali “was vomiting blood in her final days, and was so weak that she had no control of her arms and legs. The immigration authorities allegedly turned a blind eye to medical expert advice to put her on an intravenous drip or to grant her provisional release to ease her stress. A report by public broadcaster NHK suggested that officials tend to suspect malingering for minor illnesses in their reluctance to grant provisional release.”

That’s a questionable decision, since she had lost 20 kilograms from her small frame over seven months—hard to dismiss as mere “malingering” or “minor illness.” And her decline was not sudden: According to the Asahi Shinbun, she had notified her jailers from mid-January about nausea and lack of appetite. Nineteen days before her death, a urine test indicated she was in a state of starvation. The New York Times noted that in her final days she could ingest little more than water, sugar, or morsels of bread, and could barely make a fist or speak. Yet she was again refused provisional release for hospital treatment.

On March 6, 2021, Sandamali died in her cell, aged 33. An August 2021 postmortem probe by Japan’s Immigration Services Agency ruled that Sandamali had been “mistreated” by the Nagoya Regional Immigration Services Bureau, formally reprimanding the bureau’s director and three other supervisors for not reporting her requests for examination and treatment to an outside doctor.

But overlooked was cruelty of her captors. According to Nikkei Asia, “one immigration officer allegedly mocked Wishma when she was unable to swallow her drink,” and the Mainichi Shinbun reported that other Immigration officers misled a doctor about her condition two days before her death, dismissing her illness as merely “psychosomatic.”

By the time Sandamali’s family received her body, “her skin was wrinkled like an old person, and it was stuck firmly to her bones.” In November 2021, Sandamali’s family lodged a criminal complaint against officials at the Nagoya facility, accusing them of murder through willful negligence.

Unfortunately, as noted above, last week the Nagoya District Public Prosecutor’s Office dropped the Sandamali case, citing an inability to establish criminal liability or even a cause of death, blaming it on “multiple factors.”

Multiple factors indeed. Sandamali’s case is not unprecedented. According to CNN, since 1997 at least 27 foreign detainees have died in Japan’s Immigration detention centers (aka “Gaijin Tanks,” because they detain foreigners only).

The main factor here is the cruel and unusual punishment by public officers, expressly forbidden under Article 36 of the Constitution.

Yet nobody has ever been held criminally liable for foreigner deaths in detention. That’s what makes Japan’s Gaijin Tanks so cruel and unusual.

Let’s consider a few more cases, then talk about the system that killed them…

Read the rest at https://shingetsunewsagency.com/2022/06/20/visible-minorities-torture-and-murder-in-japan-detention-centers/

Asahi: “Prosecutors drop case over death of detained Sri Lankan woman”, predictably ending Criminal Case brought by the family of Wishma Sandamali, and keeping Japan’s deadly “Gaijin Tanks” unaccountable

Posted on June 17, 2022June 17, 2022 by Debito Arudou, Ph.D.

mytest

Hi Blog. The Wishma Sandamali Criminal Case has sadly reached a predictable end: Japanese prosecutors have dropped their case against the people in charge of the Immigration “Gaijin Tank” Detention Center that killed her through negligence.

We’ve talked about the Sandamali Case here on Debito.org before, as we have the many other cases of death and destruction in Japan’s cruel Detention Centers. One of the reasons they remain so cruel is that they face no accountability, as seen here. And prosecutors declining to prosecute those who kill foreigners have been discussed at length in my book Embedded Racism, Chapter 6, “A ‘Chinaman’s Chance’ in Japanese Court” (with 2022 updates of more cases, including Sandamali’s, in the Second Edition).

The Civil Case for damages brought by the Sandamali family is ongoing. But I am not optimistic about justice being done there either. Debito Arudou, Ph.D.

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Prosecutors drop case over death of detained Sri Lankan woman
THE ASAHI SHIMBUN, June 17, 2022, courtesy of lots of people.
https://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/14647083

Public prosecutors will drop their case against senior officials from the Nagoya Regional Immigration Services Bureau over the death of a Sri Lankan woman at an immigration detention facility, according to sources.

Wishma Sandamali, 33, died in March 2021 at a facility run by the bureau, in a case that sparked widespread outcry over her mistreatment.

The Nagoya District Public Prosecutors Office launched an investigation into whether the senior officials in charge at the time had committed murder or negligence as a guardian resulting in death, responding to criminal complaints against them from Wishma’s family and others.

Sources said the prosecutors office concluded it cannot establish criminal liability in this case following discussions with another prosecution office that is higher in rank.

The decision is expected to be communicated to those who made the criminal complaints, including Wishma’s family members, on June 17 at the earliest.

This will effectively end the investigation into criminal liability of the senior officials.

According to a report compiled by the Immigration Services Agency in August last year, Wishma came to Japan as a student in June 2017.

She was held at the detention facility after being arrested for overstaying her visa in August 2020.

Her health rapidly deteriorated in the facility and she started to complain about loss of appetite and nausea from mid-January 2021.

Her urine test showed that she was in a state of starvation on Feb. 15, 2021, 19 days before her death.

After that, she became even more ill and died on March 6, 2021.

The report admitted that Wishma died of an illness, but also said that “multiple factors might have caused her death and it is difficult to determine which one was the cause.”

Her family members maintain, however, that she would not have died had she received proper medical treatment, such as with an intravenous drip or hospitalization.

In November 2021, they lodged a criminal complaint with the Nagoya District Public Prosecutors Office against the then chief of the bureau, the person who acted as the chief guard at the detention facility on the day of her death, and other officials.

They argued that the officials committed murder thorough willful negligence and did not care if she died.

Earlier, in June 2021, a member of the teaching staff at a university in Nagoya had lodged a criminal complaint with the same district public prosecutors office against the bureau’s officials, alleging their conduct amounted to death through aggravated abandonment.

Wishma’s family members are also seeking around 156 million yen ($1.17 million) in damages from the state and that court case is still ongoing at the Nagoya District Court. ENDS

MRI on rude and slipshod treatment from Shizuoka hospitals and health care practitioners

Posted on June 14, 2022 by Debito Arudou, Ph.D.

mytest

Hi Blog. For all of the positive things about Japan’s near-universal health coverage system, there’s still no accounting for the rude, if not outright exclusionary, treatment that NJ often get from Japan’s health care practitioners. We’ve covered this many times on Debito.org (see several stories here, for example). Here’s another testimonial from a NJ patient I’ll call MRI. Debito Arudou, Ph.D.

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From: MRI
Subject: Issues with doctors in Shizuoka City
Date: May 6, 2022
To: debito@debito.org

Hello Dr. Arudou, I am another concerned foreigner living here in Japan.

I have been working and living in Shizuoka City for [close to a decade] now. I have not had any serious illnesses other than a mild case of chronic gastritis but in recent years, I know it has become more serious due to my symptoms becoming more severe regardless of the Takecab that I take daily for it. Due to this health issue becoming more serious, I have been needing to visit various clinics and I have been experiencing what I call indirect refusal.

So, I know that in the past, many foreigners were refused medical care due to not having kokumin kenkou hoken but even though I have a valid card, the doctor will always ignore me while I am trying to explain my symptoms and reason for my visit. Both the doctors and staff of various clinics here in Shizuoka City have almost systematically acted cold, uncaring, unresponsive and even downright rude to me.

After this happened the first couple times, I thought it was just that one particular nurse or doctor that was the problem, but after numerous experiences just like this at a number of other clinics, I realized that this is a big problem that needs to be brought to light.

Every time I am waiting in the lobby of a clinic or hospital here in Japan, I have a constant feeling that I am wasting my time and money. I almost always leave a clinic kicking myself because the doctor did indeed do everything they could to avoid helping me.

There have been times where doctors will “do a test” for a couple minutes and then quickly tell me that “I am healthy” and that “there is nothing wrong with me”. When I explain that my symptoms are sometimes terrible, they just laugh it off and tell me that they can prescribe me some medicine. The ineffective “put a band-aid over a shotgun wound” solution it seems.

These experiences have left me completely jaded with regard to the medical care system for foreigners here in Japan. It almost seems as if they couldn’t care less if we become ill and die because we are just foreigners after all. I guess the Hippocratic oath here in Japan only applies if you are of Japanese decent! I find it ironic that the stress of dealing with these doctors in pursuit of treating my health issue is actually causing my health issue to become worse!

My first experience was at Watanabe Clinic (わたなべクリニック) located in Minami-cho just south of Shizuoka Station. When I went to sit down there was a woman that had her handbag sitting on the chair next to me and after I sat down she clutched her handbag and looked at me as if I were some kind of criminal. I merely stated that she doesn’t need to clutch her handbag because I am not a thief. The doctor must have overheard me say this to the woman because he actually wrote down on the referral paper to another doctor that I am “kind of a strange person”. I did not bother reading the referral written in Japanese at the time because I just assumed he wrote a professional referral stating only the facts and the reason why I needed to have an MRI.

Of course, the hospital staff were unusually cold and uncaring toward me and it was a bit confusing during my visit. It wasn’t until I actually read the referral that I realized what he had written down. I was shocked and so was my Japanese girlfriend. She couldn’t understand how a doctor could get away with writing such unprofessional things about someone and not face any trouble for it.

I just experienced another strange occurrence today at a famous gastroenterology clinic here in Shizuoka City called Takano Surgery and Gastroenterology Clinic (高野外科胃腸科医院). This clinic is headed by director Satoshi Takano. Satoshi Takano performed an endoscopy on me 7 years ago and diagnosed me with chronic gastritis. Since then I moved to a different area and I have been receiving my prescription of Takecab from another clinic, which has not been giving me trouble so far since I only go there to pick up refills of my medicine.

So during today’s visit at Takano Surgery and Gastroenterology Clinic, I was trying to explain my worsening symptoms and mentioned that he diagnosed me with chronic gastritis 7 years ago. He looked at the old photos of my endoscopy and said in an irritated tone that I do not have chronic gastritis. Then I presented him a photograph from the endoscopy where he had written that I have gastritis on the backside. Then he let out a sigh and rechecked the photos again and then said that I do have chronic gastritis and that he just did not check all the images closely enough. He didn’t even apologize!

He still had the nerve to act like I was the one being troublesome. He kept trying to rush me and wouldn’t even let me explain my current symptoms. He seemed impatient with me and he kept asking if I want an endoscopy or what and this was before I could even explain my symptoms and get his feedback.

It was busy at the clinic today, but I have experienced doctors and staff rushing me even on days where the clinic was not busy at all. It is as if their mission is to get the foreigner out of the clinic or hospital as quickly as possible without actually seriously addressing their health issues.

So, today I basically paid 1,200yen to have an argument with a xenophobic doctor who was anything but professional.

Another terrible experience was at a clinic here in Shizuoka City called Ohya Hazama Clinic. After I moved to Oya Town, I came to this clinic for an attempt at an endoscopy. Before the endoscopy, I was given anesthetic that was supposed to put me under while he did the procedure. I guess he must not have given me enough because I did not pass out or fall asleep. I remained awake and the staff seemed annoyed by this. They came back into the room with a pillow and a blanket and turned off the light for about 20 minutes and told me to try to fall asleep. Well, I tried but I was unable to do so. Both the doctor and the nurses almost seemed irritated with me. Ridiculous as it sounds, it seems as though they were blaming me not falling asleep from the anesthesia as my fault! The doctor said to me that I can reschedule another day for an endoscopy and I told him that I will do that and left. I never returned there since.

Another wonderful experience I had was at a clinic called Shizuoka ENT Clinic (静岡ＥＮＴクリニック). While waiting to be seen by the doctor at this clinic, I noticed how friendly the staff and nurses were with all of the Japanese patients by making eye contact, smiling, answering their questions, thanking them and telling them to take care of themselves.

When it was my turn to go up to the front desk, I received none of the above. All of the staff immediately stopped smiling, they would look down while speaking with me, they seemed annoyed when I asked a couple questions, they seems cold and almost unwilling to even help me. One of them assumed that I couldn’t even speak Japanese and asked me if I could fill out a form and was explaining where I write my name and basic information. The entire experience only lasted a couple minutes but their ignorance and xenophobia was mind blowing.

When I finally had a chance to see the doctor, I explained all this to her. She couldn’t care less of course and just brushed it off. Although this doctor prescribed me the medicine I needed for my sinus infection, the overall experience was so terrible that I will never return there. I feel the same way about these other clinics. I am almost at the point where I feel like I might die of a serious illness such as cancer because none of these doctors seem willing to even look into what is going on in my body. It is a bit ridiculous that as a tax payer here in Japan, I even need to entertain thoughts about returning to my home country just to receive basic health care and visit a doctor that will provide me with proper medical care.

I apologize for the long-winded email, but I read one of your articles and I felt the need to contact you about some of my worst experiences here in Japan. I have even more horror stories than this, but these are the worst of them.
Best Regards, MRI

Kyodo: Japan-born American files suit against Japan’s dual nationality ban

Posted on June 10, 2022June 14, 2022 by Debito Arudou, Ph.D.

mytest

Hi Blog. Here’s another person challenging Japan’s ban on dual nationality. Her case makes the following circumstances clear:

If you’re born in Japan with Japanese blood, you’re a Japanese citizen.
If you’re born in Japan (or overseas) with Japanese and Non-Japanese blood, with proper registry with the GOJ after birth, you’re a citizen of both countries until age 20. Then as per the ban on dual nationality, you have to choose one. But if you choose Japanese citizenship, there is no penalty for those who do not give up their foreign nationality. As long as the GOJ doesn’t know, and they don’t try too hard to find out.
If you’re born in Japan without Japanese blood, you’re a foreigner unless you naturalize. But if you naturalize, you must give up your foreign nationalities. (However, I know at least one naturalized Japanese citizen who did not give up their NJ nationality, and still maintains both unbeknownst to the GOJ.)
If you’re born in Japan (or overseas) with Japanese blood and then move permanently overseas and take another citizenship, and the GOJ finds out about it, you will unilaterally lose your Japanese citizenship, as the article below makes clear.
The wild card: If you are famous, like Nobel Prize winners or famous elites like Alberto Fujimori, former authoritarian President of Peru. Then you can get your Japanese citizenship back in an eyeblink. Again, for purposes of national pride, the rule of law doesn’t apply: “They’ll claim us if we’re famous.”

Anyway, Japan’s Nationality Law makes things unnecessarily arbitrary, racialized, and complicated, as described in more detail in my book “Embedded Racism“. And it does not pay to be honest. Let’s take a closer look at the case described in Case 4 above. Arudou Debito, Ph.D.

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Japan-born American files suit against Japan’s dual nationality ban
KYODO NEWS – Jun 2, 2022, courtesy of EYS
https://english.kyodonews.net/news/2022/06/d25c7dd60667-japan-born-american-files-suit-against-japans-dual-nationality-ban.html

A Japanese-born American said Thursday she has filed a lawsuit with a Japanese court claiming that the country’s nationality law, which bans its citizens from also holding a foreign nationality, violates the Constitution.

Yuri Kondo, 75, who currently lives in Fukuoka in southwestern Japan and filed the lawsuit at the Fukuoka District Court, said at a press conference with her legal team that acquiring U.S. citizenship should not have automatically stripped her of her Japanese one.

Kondo, who was born in Kamakura, Kanagawa Prefecture, moved to the United States in 1971 to attend graduate school and began practicing law in Arizona in 1997.

After becoming a U.S. citizen in 2004, she attempted to renew her Japanese passport in 2017 but her application was rejected. She is currently in Japan on her U.S. passport.

Kondo claims that Article 11 of the nationality law, which stipulates that Japanese citizens automatically lose their nationality upon gaining a foreign nationality, violates the right to pursue happiness and equality as guaranteed by the Constitution.

“Nationality is an important human right, and it is illegal to automatically take it away from someone without their consent,” she said.

The Tokyo District Court in January 2021 rejected a similar lawsuit filed by eight men and women residing in Europe, ruling that Japan’s nationality law is constitutional. The plaintiffs have appealed. ENDS

Japan Today expose: How the media failed Japan’s most vulnerable immigrants (Feb 22, 2022)

Posted on June 2, 2022June 3, 2022 by Debito Arudou, Ph.D.

mytest

(Photo courtesy of Japan Today)

Hi Blog. Since Japan Today has a history of “expiring” its articles (in addition to some irresponsible journalistic practices) and this one is important enough to warrant public archiving, Debito.org includes its full text below for the record. As Japan’s xenophobic and extreme border controls continue to treat foreign outsiders like the plague despite some signs of opening (as we have discussed here, here, and here), officialdom treats foreigners it has incarcerated like animals or worse (as we have discussed here). What follows is some excellent original reporting on yet another death in custody, and the political ramifications that conspired to maintain the deadly status quo. Debito Arudou, Ph.D.

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Opinions
How the media failed Japan’s most vulnerable immigrants
Japan Today, Feb. 22, 2022, By Dreux Richard, courtesy of JDG
https://japantoday.com/category/features/opinions/how-the-media-failed-japans-immigrants?comment-order=popular
TOKYO
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs is a strange institution. It’s responsible for the way Japan is perceived abroad, and it decides who receives the opportunity to immigrate. But its jurisdiction over the lives of immigrants largely vanishes when they reach Japan. It’s also the most influential agency that does not play a meaningful role in developing the government’s legislative agenda. Senior MoFA officials can only watch in dismay as less prestigious agencies, including some of Japan’s most corrupt, devise legislation that erodes the rights of immigrants and damages Japan’s international reputation.

A proposed overhaul of Japan’s detention system, scuttled in 2021 after the death of detainee Wishma Rathnayake and a resulting wave of protests, was especially unpopular with Japanese diplomats. The Kishida administration has revived it anyway, with parliamentary debate anticipated this summer. Until recently, MoFA relied on the press to guard against legislative aggression toward immigrants, quietly passing sensitive information to reporters who covered the Ministry of Justice, which enforces immigration law.

According to MoFA officials who acted as my sources during the 10 years I covered immigration, their current reluctance to cooperate with journalists is related to the sense, among the agency’s staff, that the media has become “much louder, but much less effective” on issues of immigration.

The officials I spoke with traced this problem to 2019, when a detainee starved to death at a detention center in Nagasaki, following a four-week hunger strike.

The Ministry of Justice cleared the detention center of wrongdoing, issuing a report that contained several defamatory statements about the detainee. He was not, as the ministry’s findings suggested, a hardened criminal or a deadbeat father—not according to court records, not according to his family.

The report went on to claim that it wasn’t possible to return the detainee to Nigeria because he refused to cooperate with the deportation process in January 2019. But the report also documented a meeting in May of 2019 where the detainee begged to be deported. As one MoFA official dryly observed, “May comes after January.”

The death was covered in Japan’s major newspapers, as well as a variety of global outlets. All of them printed the government’s claims without attempting to verify them. Not a single reporter succeeded in confirming the identity of the detainee, a native of southeastern Nigeria who came to Japan 19 years earlier to look for work in the leather tanneries of Hyogo Prefecture. His name was Gerald “Sunny” Okafor.

An important story about the destruction of a family was overlooked. Okafor’s widow, who is deaf, struggled to raise her daughter alone after her husband was detained, pushing her to the brink of psychological collapse. Immigration officials took advantage of her vulnerability, pressuring her to file for divorce and promising—disingenuously—that it would expedite Okafor’s release.

The media also failed to uncover administrative malpractice at the detention center, which led Mr. Okafor to believe that steps were being taken to expedite his return to Nigeria. After learning this wasn’t true, he refused to receive intravenous fluids, precipitating his death. The Nigerian embassy helped the Ministry of Justice cover up these mistakes, leaving a paper trail in Okafor’s immigration file.

The success of this cover-up has undermined the best opportunity to sink the proposed immigration reforms, which were developed in response to Okafor’s death. The reforms are based on the insulting notion that the detention center could have saved Okafor if it had possessed greater powers of coercion—the power to sanction his attorneys, for instance, if they pushed too aggressively for their client’s release.

But the press has helped to turn Okafor’s death into a non-story, by disseminating state propaganda that diminishes the death’s significance, then responding to that propaganda with opinion essays instead of investigations.

“The media approaches the immigration debate as an ideological matter, rather than a test of the integrity of Japan’s institutions,” observed one MoFA official who monitored Mr. Okafor’s case. “That’s not helpful to people in government who are trying to fix the system, because it doesn’t change anybody’s mind. It only inflames existing disagreements.”

If disobeying the instructions of immigration officials becomes a criminal offense, as the government has now proposed, it will be made possible by the collapse of non-partisan relationships between trustworthy elements of Japan’s government and their counterparts in the press.

Mr. Okafor’s body shortly after his death. “Japan never saw what starvation did to that man. It should haunt them,” said Stanley Egbogota, chairman of an Igbo civic association that raised money for Mr. Okafor’s family. Photo: With permission from the family of Gerald Okafor

In an era of journalism where editorial decisions are shaped by web traffic and algorithms, the loss of knowledgeable sources may not strike every media professional as a matter of concern. Reporters didn’t need to speak with anyone who knew Mr. Okafor in order to write about him, or to decide that it was no longer necessary to write about him — even as parliament debated legislation that resulted from his death.

“They got the answers they needed,” Okafor’s widow observed in our most recent correspondence. “And in such a convenient way: from no one, from nowhere.”

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For six years, Dreux Richard covered Japan’s Nigerian community for a daily newspaper in Tokyo. His first book, Every Human Intention: Japan in the New Century, was published by Pantheon in 2021. ENDS