Todd Jay Leonard, Blog
A little while back, a reader wrote to ask about immigration in Japan. He wanted to know what types of immigrants take Japanese citizenship, how well they are accepted into Japanese society and how easily they are able to assimilate into mainstream Japanese society and culture.
I imagine the reader is thinking that I either forgot about his e-mail or that I wasn't interested in the topic since it has taken me so long to get to it. Neither, actually. I usually write this column several months ahead, and his question happened to arrive at a time when I had a number of columns already in the docket.
The question is actually quite timely, as immigration issues - at the center of the 2008 election rhetoric already under way in the United States - is being focused upon quite intensely in Japan as well.
Until recently, it was quite rare for foreigners to go through the actual immigration process where they take Japanese citizenship, making them, in essence, Japanese. Traditionally, the majority of expatriates that decided to call Japan home were people who chose to come here for professional reasons and were quite happy to glide back and forth between Japan and their home countries, being satisfied with a "work visa" or "permanent residency."
Previously, I used to have a three-year "professor's visa" until I applied and received "permanent residency." This allows me to come back and forth to Japan freely and to stay and work legally for as long as I wish. It is not Japanese citizenship but a long-term visa that allows me more freedom to live and work here, similar to an American "green card" that resident aliens are granted who reside in the U.S. for an extended period of time.
The 'bubble' economy
The proverbial "bubble" economy that Japan enjoyed in the 1980s made it necessary to loosen the restrictions regarding "visiting workers," giving them a new status. A shortage of laborers during that time period required Japan to open its borders to allow laborers and unskilled workers to do the jobs that many Japanese people refused to do.
This is similar to the situation in the United States, where migrant workers from Mexico were needed to pick produce during the summer and autumn seasons in the upper Midwest and in Florida and California during the winter and spring seasons. Many of these workers, after years of working and residing in the United States, opted to make the U.S. their home.
The original intention of the Japanese government, I believe, was that the migrant workers would come into Japan to shore up the labor shortage for a short-term stint and then return to their home countries with money in their pockets and hopefully some new job skills that they could then use there.
What the government didn't count on was that many of these people who came from countries where the economies were not doing as well, had political strife or were at war decided to stay in Japan.
Some of these workers married Japanese nationals, had children and set up house. Others lived illegally, continuing to do the jobs that no one else wanted to do. The government officials largely turned a blind eye to such practices, because a need was being filled.
Newcomers
Fast-forward 20 years, and now we have communities in the larger cities where pockets of foreign nationals live together, creating entire neighborhoods of non-Japanese from the same ethnic background. No concrete programs were introduced to help these people assimilate, so there are instances where problems have arisen when the foreign workers haven't adapted well to Japanese culture and now are being shunned in Japanese mainstream communities by the locals.
This only exacerbates the situation, because instead of trying to assist these newcomers to Japan to live and work alongside their Japanese counterparts, little ghettos are being created where these foreigners become isolated, making their Japanese neighbors suspicious of their ways of living, which in turn fuels the tendency of mainstream Japanese to become insular in their thinking toward these newcomers.
A good example of this dates back to the late 1980s, when a town in the southern prefecture of Aichi, Homigaoka, desperately needed workers to fill a severe labor shortage. The town officials thought a solution would be to employ ethnic Japanese-Brazilians. Physically they looked Japanese, even having Japanese surnames. Ethnically and culturally, however, they were 100 percent Brazilian.
Their grandparents had emigrated from Japan to Brazil in search of a better life. Probably the first generation after the initial wave of immigrants lived a largely Japanese life in Brazil.
Each ensuing generation, however, became more Brazilian until the 1980s, when the large majority of the Japanese-Brazilians who, like their great-grandparents before them who were searching for a better life, came back to Japan to find work.
Culture shock
The Japanese government created a new type of working visa to allow these second- and third-generation Japanese-Brazilians to work in Japan more easily, cutting out much of the bureaucratic red tape normally required to work in Japan.
The problem was, though, they were so far removed from their Japanese roots that they readily identified with their Brazilian culture and traditions more so than their Japanese ethnic heritage.
Nearly all of them had no real Japanese language skills, had not eaten Japanese food prior to coming to Japan and had no idea about Japanese etiquette, traditions or culture.
The town officials assumed because they "looked" Japanese that they would "behave" like Japanese. With no programs in place to assist these newly arrived immigrants to fit into their new surroundings and life, problems soon arose with mainstream Japanese who found themselves sharing their community with the Brazilians.
I remember a newspaper article during this time that listed all the improper things the Brazilians were doing that horrified the local native Japanese population. One of the biggest offenses to the locals was that some of the Brazilians would go to the local public bath wearing swimming trunks - treating it more like a "hot tub" than the intended "bath tub."
Cheap labor
Few people here can deny the economic impact that cheap labor has had on Japan's auto industry, making it quite competitive on the world market. This is the short-term gain companies enjoyed by employing so many foreign workers in the "just in time" auto-manufacturing system.
This system allows for a lower overhead because instead of having all the components made in one location, companies like Toyota subcontract much of the production to smaller companies that are very dependent upon the cheap labor that the Brazilian-Japanese immigrants offer. Each component is delivered "just in time" on the assembly line, which cuts down on the size of factories and the need to stock so many parts.
The down side to this is that these workers, many of whom now have permanent residency and can stay in Japan indefinitely, are categorized officially as being only "part-time" workers (even though they work a 40-hour or more week), which means companies do not have to pay wages as high as for full-time employees, or pay into the health-insurance or pension-fund schemes for these employees, leaving many without proper health care and with no real retirement plan in place.
In the long term, by saving money now by not paying the workers sufficient incomes and by not insisting they have proper socialized health insurance and retirement benefits, what will happen to these people when they have debilitating, chronic illnesses or when they are elderly?
Facing the future
These questions haven't been fully answered by Japanese government officials, because they are too giddy with the prospect of the economy finally having a turn-around and the fact that the Japanese auto industry is going gangbusters at the moment, placing Japan in a position of envy by U.S. and European automakers.
For the time being, they are like ostriches with their heads in the sand, pretending all is well. The next 20 years will see huge demographic changes in Japan when the children of the immigrants begin to marry and have families, changing the entire landscape of Japan. Before this occurs, however, a more serious problem is plaguing the offspring of these newcomers: lack of education.
There is no law that requires compulsory education of the children of these immigrants in Japan. Although the majority does attend school, the dropout rate is high, because there are no systematic programs in place to teach Japanese as a second language (JSL) to these immigrant children, so their written Japanese and ability to function in mainstream Japanese schools are weak.
It is difficult enough for native Japanese children to keep up with all the kanji characters they must learn each year to be able to read and write properly. It is doubly difficult for children who are thrown into a mainstream classroom with no remedial assistance or special tutoring.
The future social implications of this are tremendous. Without proper education and know-how that would allow these children to have some semblance of social mobility once they become adults, they might be cast into an even lower socioeconomic bracket because they will not be able to perform any worthwhile jobs other than menial labor.
Japan is at a huge crossroads currently. The population of Japan is dangerously low, causing elementary schools across the country to close and currently making universities jittery as this wave eventually will cause a good number of universities, colleges, junior colleges and trade schools to either scale back or close.
Japan's future, whether it wants to admit it or not, is going to be closely intertwined with a large migration of foreigners who will come to Japan for short-term work to fill the growing shortage of workers but who will end up staying on permanently. These foreigners will then marry, have children and become a part of the changing face of Japan.
Will Japan embrace these people by offering them proper visas, insurance and pension schemes, as well as education, to make them more functional in society? Or will Japan use them for labor only, denying these workers equal rights and a proper livelihood by casting them away when no longer needed?
It will be interesting to see which direction Japan takes. If past directives and attitudes are any indication, however, the future looks rather bleak for these immigrant workers who are hoping to call Japan home.
The United States certainly has handled the immigration of workers to the U.S. horribly, which is why the 2008 election will be decided in part on this issue. Japan might be having the same contemptuous debate the United States is having in 20 years if it doesn't start accepting the harsh reality that in order for it to maintain its competitive edge and world standing, it will have to accept and assimilate immigrants into its society, offering these workers a way to live and work alongside Japanese people that gives them equal footing and personal dignity. Only time will tell.
By TODD JAY LEONARD
Columnist
Japan's challenge
Immigration becoming central issue of Japan’s economic future
Monday, August 27 , 2007
