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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…
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2 comments on “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”
I wrote to MOFA at the time complaining about the treatment they were giving permanent residents and it upset me so much, that I’ve actually left Japan. Sick of being treated like a guest despite having lived there 12 years, Japanese wife and kids, N1 level Japanese, decent job, and being a law-abiding tax paying resident. Apparently, none of that counts.
So, I’ve left Japan permanently for greener pastures. I was earning about 8 million yen a year and paying a fair bit of tax with about 30 working years left, so their loss!
The LDP can keep bribing old communities in the countryside to vote LDP with subsidies and pork barrel projects, but that will never stop the countryside communities from succumbing to old age and disappearing. And then there won’t be the votes there for the LDP. It’s like a murder-suicide pact between the LDP and old rural communities.
As a result, any meaningful policies to avert any of the impacts of Japan’s demographic timebomb are non-existent.
Apres nous le deluge style, the old people and the LDP will disappear to leave anyone under 30 now wondering how to fix the disaster they will inherit.