{"id":16428,"date":"2021-02-15T00:27:00","date_gmt":"2021-02-15T08:27:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.debito.org\/?p=16428"},"modified":"2021-02-15T15:27:11","modified_gmt":"2021-02-15T23:27:11","slug":"debito-org-newsletter-february-15-2021","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.debito.org\/?p=16428","title":{"rendered":"DEBITO.ORG NEWSLETTER FEBRUARY 15, 2021"},"content":{"rendered":"

Books, eBooks, and more from Debito Arudou, Ph.D. (click on icon):
\n\"Guidebookcover.jpg\"<\/a>\"japaneseonlyebookcovertext\"<\/a>\"Handbook<\/a>\"\"<\/a>\"\u300c\u30b8\u30e3\u30d1\u30cb\u30fc\u30ba\u30fb\u30aa\u30f3\u30ea\u30fc\u3000\u5c0f\u6a3d\u5165\u6d74\u62d2\u5426\u554f\u984c\u3068\u4eba\u7a2e\u5dee\u5225\u300d\uff08\u660e\u77f3\u66f8\u5e97\uff09\"<\/a>\"sourstrawberriesavatar\"<\/a>\"debitopodcastthumb\"<\/a>\"FodorsJapan2014cover\"<\/a>
\nUPDATES ON TWITTER: arudoudebito
\nDEBITO.ORG PODCASTS on iTunes, subscribe free
\n“LIKE” US on Facebook at http:\/\/www.facebook.com\/debitoorg<\/a>
\nhttps:\/\/www.facebook.com\/embeddedrcsmJapan<\/a>
\nhttp:\/\/www.facebook.com\/handbookimmigrants<\/a>
\nhttps:\/\/www.facebook.com\/JapaneseOnlyTheBook<\/a>
\nhttps:\/\/www.facebook.com\/BookInAppropriate<\/a><\/p>\n

DEBITO.ORG NEWSLETTER FEBRUARY 15, 2021<\/strong><\/p>\n

Table of Contents:<\/em><\/strong>
\n\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/
\n1) Reuters and ABC News: Tokyo 2020 chief Mori makes sexist remarks at Olympics meeting. It\u2019s been within character for decades now, so retire him.<\/strong>
\n2) Kyodo: Japan developing GPS tracking system for foreign travelers as \u201canti-virus measure\u201d. So Covid is now another international event, justifying more policing of foreigners only?<\/strong>
\n3) Kyodo: Tokyo District Court rules in favor of Japan\u2019s ban on dual nationality. My, what paranoia and hypocrisy<\/strong>
\n4) Full text of SNA VM column 3 now archived on Debito.org: \u201cRacial Profiling at Japanese Hotel Check-Ins\u201d, October 23, 2019<\/strong><\/p>\n

… and finally…<\/em><\/strong>
\n5) My SNA Visible Minorities column 18: \u201cLatest visa rules could purge any foreigner\u201d (Jan 18, 2021), on how Covid countermeasures disproportionately target Non-Japanese against all science or logic<\/strong>
\n\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/<\/p>\n

By Debito Arudou, Ph.D. (debito@debito.org, www.debito.org Twitter @arudoudebito)
\nDebito.org Newsletters as always are freely forwardable<\/p>\n

\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/
\n1) Reuters and ABC News: Tokyo 2020 chief Mori makes sexist remarks at Olympics meeting. It\u2019s been within character for decades now, so retire him.<\/strong><\/p>\n

ABC News: Mori, an 83-year-old former prime minister of Japan, made the remarks during an executive meeting of the Japanese Olympic Committee that was held online Wednesday. When giving his \u201cprivate opinion\u201d about the committee\u2019s goal of increasing the number of female board directors from 20% to more than 40%, Mori expressed concern about how that would affect the length of meetings, according to a report by The Asahi Shimbun, one of Japan\u2019s largest daily newspapers. [\u2026]<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cA meeting of an executive board that includes many women would take time,\u201d Mori was quoted as saying by the newspaper. \u201cWomen are competitive. When someone raises his or her hand and speaks, they probably think they should speak too. That is why they all end up making comments.\u201d [..] Speaking at a hastily-prepared press conference on Thursday, Mori confirmed he made the comments and offered an apology. \u201cIt was an inappropriate remark that went against the spirit of the Olympics and Paralympics,\u201d he said. \u201cI deeply regret it and would like to sincerely apologize to anyone whom I have offended.\u201d When asked about the calls for his resignation, Mori told reporters: \u201cI\u2019m not considering resigning.\u201d [\u2026]<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

COMMENT FROM SUBMITTER MG:<\/strong> \u201cJust wanted to send another bit of good Debito fodder from our ol\u2019 buddy Mori Yoshiro. Just another reminder of what a terrible choice it was to hire this jerk to head an Olympics that really should just never have been handed to Japan in the first place when there was still a ruined Tohoku that needed rebuilding. Were it not for the long-term economic consequences that will follow my beloved adopted home country due to folly of these Games, I would surely enjoy the schadenfreude of a group of elites getting egg all over their face.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

COMMENT FROM DEBITO<\/strong>: Mori, one of Japan\u2019s least-popular Prime Ministers ever, is the type of Japan elite dinosaur zombie politician (in the same vein as equally useless Former PM Aso Taro) who feels he can say whatever bigoted thing pops into his head (as I cover in this blog entry, he\u2019s made many other racist statements), and not be held accountable. Because he never really has. Despite being a lousy leader, he just keeps on getting jobs leading things \u2014 such as high-profile sports committees (the Rugby World Cup in 2019) that turn into international embarrassments. As it has again today. To Japan, tolerating Mori Yoshiro is like tolerating gaffes from the UK\u2019s Prince Philip. But Mori is not royalty, endured only because his position is essential upholding an apparently sacrosanct system. He should be retired from public service immediately even if he refuses to resign. It\u2019s obviously long overdue.<\/p>\n

https:\/\/www.debito.org\/?p=16414<\/a><\/p>\n

\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/<\/p>\n

2) Kyodo: Japan developing GPS tracking system for foreign travelers as \u201canti-virus measure\u201d. So Covid is now another international event, justifying more policing of foreigners only?<\/strong><\/p>\n

In a development that Debito.org has been anticipating for quite some time (see, for example, the remotely-trackable RFID chipped Zairyuu Kaado ID cards the Government rolled out in 2012 to keep better tabs on NJ Residents), according to a Kyodo article below the Government is using the Tokyo 2020 Olympics as an excuse to enact programs digitally tracking all foreign tourists.<\/p>\n

Nothing quite like being forced to wear the equivalent of a GPS criminal tracker for your entire stay. And it\u2019s not a stretch to see it being applied beyond tourists to NJ Residents after that, as Covid is providing a pretense to \u201ctrack and trace\u201d those \u201cforeign clusters\u201d. As CNN notes, \u201cIf visitors are allowed [to attend the Olympics], their experience will likely be high-tech. The government is developing a contract tracing app for attendees using GPS that will reportedly link visas, proof of test results, tickets and other information, authorities said.\u201d<\/p>\n

Visas? So we\u2019re getting Immigration involved? As Submitter JDG notes, \u201cObviously, it\u2019s just a matter of time until the Japanese demand all NJ are 24\/7 tracked legally in real time with an automated alert popping up on some koban monitor the minute their visas expire. That ought to end that nefarious den of crime right there! Whew.\u201d<\/p>\n

So with the advance of technology, the dragnet further tightens on \u201cthe foreign element\u201d in Japan. As we have seen with the G8 Summits, the 2002 soccer World Cup, the 2019 Rugby World Cup, \u201cVisit Japan\u201d tourism campaigns in general, and now the 2020 Olympics, international events in Japan serve to inflame its knee-jerk \u201csafety and security\u201d reflexes, and justify all manner of bad overpolicing habits. They essentially become an excuse to invite foreigners in, then police them further.<\/p>\n

https:\/\/www.debito.org\/?p=16363<\/a><\/p>\n

\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/<\/p>\n

3) Kyodo: Tokyo District Court rules in favor of Japan\u2019s ban on dual nationality. My, what paranoia and hypocrisy<\/strong><\/p>\n

In a landmark ruling yesterday (see articles below) first testing the waters for allowing Japanese to have more diverse roots in a legal sense, the Tokyo District Court has just ruled that Japanese who obtain other citizenships do not have constitutional protections from being subsequently deprived of Japanese citizenship. This means:<\/p>\n

a) If you as a Japanese citizen naturalize in another country, then when the Japanese government decides to take away your Japanese citizenship, you have no legal recourse under the Japanese Constitution. It can be unilaterally revoked at the government\u2019s discretion.<\/p>\n

b) If you as a native-born Japanese citizen have dual nationality due to having international parents, and if you do not declare to the Japanese government that you are a Japanese citizen only (and have renounced all other citizenships by age 22 \u2014 as Osaka Naomi, referred to below, reportedly did), then the Japanese government can revoke your Japanese citizenship and not deprive you of any Constitutionally-guaranteed rights.<\/p>\n

Conclusion: Essentially, nothing has changed in practice. The lower judiciary has essentially just made its stance against dual nationality clear. Take into account that this ruling, handed down by a notoriously conservative branch of Japan\u2019s judiciary (yes, Tokyo District and High Courts are actually well-known around the Japanese legal community for their very conservative judgments), has merely affirmed what was already true: \u201ctwo passports = untrustworthy\u201d. And their legal reasoning mentioned in the articles below reflects that logic, based upon paranoid pre-war arguments about individual mixed allegiances threatening the motherland, etc., with no need to update for the complexities of the modern world. Should the plaintiffs decide to appeal this case, then the Tokyo High Court and probably eventually the Supreme Court will affirm the lower court\u2019s ruling. So it\u2019s definitive.<\/p>\n

What to do about it: Continue to follow Debito.org\u2019s advice: If you have two passports, you always claim to be solely Japanese by age 22 but secretly keep renewing your foreign passport. The Japanese government is still not fully enforcing any draconian \u201cshow us a revoked foreign passport by age 22 or we will revoke your Japanese citizenship\u201d towards all its citizens with international roots. Given Japan\u2019s dropping population, that\u2019s probably not in its interest. But if the Japanese government ever gets around to doing that, based upon yesterday\u2019s ruling, as far as the Japanese judiciary is concerned it will have free rein.<\/p>\n

https:\/\/www.debito.org\/?p=16393<\/a><\/p>\n

\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/<\/p>\n

4) Full text of SNA VM column 3 now archived on Debito.org: \u201cRacial Profiling at Japanese Hotel Check-Ins\u201d, October 23, 2019<\/strong><\/p>\n

SNA: \u00a0In Japan, your first experience might be with your apartment search\u2014realtors may deny you a home simply because \u201cthe landlord doesn\u2019t like foreigners.\u201d<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Sadly, there\u2019s little you can do: racial discrimination is not illegal in Japan, even in 2019. You could report what happened to the Ministry of Justice\u2019s Human Rights Bureau (which will generally do nothing), or take them to court where you\u2019re at the mercy of a judge susceptible to narratives of \u201cforeigners are different\/difficult, so refusing them is okay,\u201d which is known legally as \u201crational discrimination.\u201d Still, you will need a place right away to call home.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Eventually, after getting an interlocutor to negotiate or an employer to vouch for you, you find one. You\u2019ll forget about what happened. Something like this doesn\u2019t happen every day, right?<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

But it may occur the next time you want a hotel room. Given the tourism boom and hosted international sports events, racial profiling and discrimination have become widespread in Japan\u2019s hoteling industry. This is particularly insidious because it\u2019s not just the occasional bigoted landlord calling the shots; this time it\u2019s the Japanese police\u2026<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Full text now up at https:\/\/www.debito.org\/?p=15804<\/a><\/p>\n

\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/<\/p>\n

… and finally…<\/p>\n

5) My SNA Visible Minorities column 18: \u201cLatest visa rules could purge any foreigner\u201d (Jan 18, 2021), on how Covid countermeasures disproportionately target Non-Japanese against all science or logic<\/strong><\/p>\n

SNA: New year, new salvo of foreigner bashing: Last week, the Suga administration unveiled re-entry rules that permit non-Japanese residents to re-enter the same as Japanese, as long as they completed the same paperwork and fourteen-day quarantine. Good, but here\u2019s the wrinkle: If you are found in violation of any quarantine regulations, you don\u2019t just get in trouble like Japanese by, err, having your name made public. You may lose your visa status and get deported from the country. You read that right.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

This policy was in reaction to the discovery of the United Kingdom mutation of Covid within Japan this month. But like most policy created in times of shock, it has hasty assumptions: that a foreign variant meant that foreigners were somehow responsible. In fact, the Patient Zeroes who came back from England and went out partying instead of quarantining were Japanese.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

This new policy is ironic. In addition to the past year of Japanese media blaming foreigners for creating \u201cforeign clusters,\u201d it also ignores the lazy government response to Covid. Nobody at the national level wanted to take the responsibility for declaring a blanket state of emergency. But since infections have now reached record numbers, here comes the crackdown\u2014and once again foreigners are being disproportionately targeted.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Granted, the government is now threatening to mete out jail time and fines for Japanese who don\u2019t cooperate with measures to reduce Covid\u2019s spread. This has occasioned the perfunctory hand-wringing about the effectiveness of punishment in curbing infections and \u201cinfringing too much on personal freedoms\u201d for Japanese. I see that as part of the healthy give-and-take of political debate, to make sure things don\u2019t go too far. But where is the parallel debate about the \u201cfreedoms\u201d of non-Japanese residents who are receiving unequal treatment under the law?<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

A Japanese getting a fine or a spell in the clink is one thing, but it\u2019s incomparable to a foreigner losing their legal status gleaned after years or decades of residency, followed by deportation and permanent separation from their lives, livelihoods, and families in Japan. We know that one of the reasons Covid became a pandemic is because of asymptomatic transmission. So what if a person who doesn\u2019t know they\u2019re sick and hasn\u2019t left the country gets linked to a cluster by contact tracing? If that somebody happens to be a foreigner, his or her life in Japan may well be over\u2026<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

https:\/\/www.debito.org\/?p=16382<\/a><\/p>\n

\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/<\/p>\n

That’s all for this month. Thanks for reading!
\nDEBITO.ORG NEWSLETTER FEBRUARY 15, 2021 ENDS<\/strong><\/p>\n

======================
\nDo you like what you read on Debito.org? \u00a0Want to help keep the archive active and support Debito.org’s activities? \u00a0Please consider donating a little something. \u00a0More details here<\/a>. Or if you prefer something less complicated, just click on an advertisement below.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Table of Contents:
\n1) Reuters and ABC News: Tokyo 2020 chief Mori makes sexist remarks at Olympics meeting. It\u2019s been within character for decades now, so retire him.
\n2) Kyodo: Japan developing GPS tracking system for foreign travelers as \u201canti-virus measure\u201d. So Covid is now another international event, justifying more policing of foreigners only?
\n3) Kyodo: Tokyo District Court rules in favor of Japan\u2019s ban on dual nationality. My, what paranoia and hypocrisy
\n4) Full text of SNA VM column 3 now archived on Debito.org: \u201cRacial Profiling at Japanese Hotel Check-Ins\u201d, October 23, 2019
\n… and finally…
\n5) My SNA Visible Minorities column 18: \u201cLatest visa rules could purge any foreigner\u201d (Jan 18, 2021), on how Covid countermeasures disproportionately target Non-Japanese against all science or logic<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16428","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-newsletters"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.debito.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16428","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.debito.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.debito.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.debito.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.debito.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=16428"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.debito.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16428\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16429,"href":"https:\/\/www.debito.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16428\/revisions\/16429"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.debito.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=16428"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.debito.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=16428"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.debito.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=16428"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}