[ARTICLE] On Immigrants in/and Japan
Jul. 24th, 2003 12:05 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonald"Outsiders waiting to be insiders"
Howard W. French
The New York Times
Thursday, July 24, 2003
Changes for Japan
HIMEJI, Japan With their tidy suburban home, a late-model Toyota in the driveway and two school-age children whose Japanese is indistinguishable from any native's, Akio Nakashima and his wife, Yoshie, are the perfect immigrants.
Though Vietnamese by origin, as fellow Asians they would be hard to pick out in a crowd. Through years of diligent study they have mastered this country's difficult language. Although they incurred the ire of their parents, they even adopted Japanese names in order to assimilate better.
Outside of the workplace, however, in 21 years in this Japan, where they arrived as boat people in 1982, the Nakashimas have never managed to make friends in this country. Even that is a petty concern compared to the worry that troubles their sleep.
"As far as my life goes, it doesn't matter if I am Vietnamese or Japanese," said Akio Nakashima, a 36-year-old engineer at a tire factory. "My biggest worry is prejudice and discrimination against my children. We pay the same taxes as anyone else, but will our children be able to work for a big company, or get jobs as civil servants?"
Many economists and demographers, both here and abroad, say that Japan's success or failure in addressing the concerns of immigrants like the Nakashimas will go a long way toward determining whether this country remains an economic powerhouse or its population shrivels and the slow fade of the Japanese economy turns into a rout.
Japan is at the leading edge of a phenomenon that is beginning to strike many advanced countries - rapidly aging populations and dwindling birth rates. Japan's country's work force peaked in 1998, and has since entered a decline that experts expect to accelerate.
By midcentury, according to demographers, Japan will have 30 percent fewer people, and one million 100-year-olds. By that time, 800,000 more people will die each year than are born.
And by century's end, according to United Nations estimates, the present-day population of 120 million will be cut in half.
Better integrating women into the workplace may help in the short term, but experts say the only hope for stabilizing the population is massive immigration, sustained over many years.
Failing this, the potentially disastrous consequences are not only about a scarcity of workers or falling demand, but an outright collapse of the pension system, as the tax base shrinks and the elderly population booms.
Speaking before Parliament earlier this year, Japan's finance minister warned of just such a collapse, before he later, unconvincingly, retracted his comments as too alarming.
In order to restore demographic equilibrium here, Japan would need 17 million new immigrants by 2050, according to a recent United Nations report.
Japan, however, is the most tenaciously insular of all the world's top industrial countries, and deeply conservative notions about ethnic purity and what it means to be Japanese make it extraordinarily hard for even experts here to envision massive immigration. At 17 million, the immigrants would represent 18 percent of the population in a country where immigrants now amount to only 1 percent.
Even that modest figure merits an asterisk, because it consists mostly of second- and third-generation Koreans and Chinese, descendants of people brought to Japan when it maintained colonies on the Asian mainland. As the Nakashimas, from Vietnam, know all too well, even long-term immigrants face frequent discrimination and are not accepted as "real" Japanese.
"The kind of figures the demographers talk about are unimaginable for Japan," said Hiroshi Komai, a population expert at Tsukuba University. "In a quarter century, we have only absorbed one million immigrants.
"Societies have always risen and faded," he added, "and Japan will likely disappear and something else will take its place, but that's not such a problem. Greece and Rome disappeared, too."
Komai's belief that Japan cannot absorb newcomers is free of the strident nativism that is common among the conservative political leadership, like the governor of Tokyo, Shintaro Ishihara, who once warned of "genetic pollution" from China.
Rather, he insists, it grows out of a realistic appraisal of his society's social limitations, including those of its workplace culture and educational system.
English-language skills in Japan, for example, rank along with North Korea's as among the worst in Asia, making it difficult for Japan to attract international talent to its universities. For the same reason, Japanese diplomas have little international portability.
Because of these issues and the society's enduring insularity, Komai said, the country could probably absorb no more than 200,000 newcomers over the next decade, a far cry from what the experts say is needed.
The government appears to agree, and has planned only to encourage a kind of "high-end" immigration that would be limited to elites with specialized knowledge or skills.
Many critics say, however, that even that strategy may fail, as Japan is increasingly incapable of competing for foreign brainpower, not only against the United States and Western Europe, but against South Korea and China, which are seen as lands of far greater opportunity.
In a much-noted recent speech, Hiroshi Okuda, president of the Japanese Business Federation, made an implicit appeal for broader immigration by pointing to the experience of the United States.
"People stress the fruit of the IT revolution for the drastic economic advance of the United States during the 1990's," he said. "But we cannot overlook the fact that the influx of foreigners at a rate of a million per year supported this economic growth."
New immigrants, he added, should bear the tax burden of supporting Japan's social security system.
The government's stated preference for highly skilled immigrants also runs up against tradition here, which has always favored allowing small numbers of immigrants to perform dirty, dangerous and difficult jobs, known as Three-K work here, after the equivalent Japanese words, which all begin with K.
In these sectors, signs are multiplying that pragmatic thinking and downright necessity are beginning to win out over hidebound official planning, as small communities of immigrants, albeit mostly illegal ones, take root.
Already, the construction industry makes wide use of immigrants, mostly from other Asian countries, to fill the most dangerous and low-paying jobs.
"We have already reached the point where the Japanese economy cannot function without foreign workers," said Mioko Honda, a leader of the two-year-old Union of Migrant Workers.
"The construction companies use Thais and Filipinos by day, because they are inconspicuous, and Africans and others are used at night, or in factory work."
The integration of these workers has been less than perfect. Honda's group was founded to help illegal foreign workers recover salary or benefits owed to them by unscrupulous employees.
A visit to one of the union's offices, in Kawasaki, an industrial city near Tokyo, turned up a impressively varied group of immigrants - from Peru, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, the Philippines and Bolivia - chatting and waiting for help amid the cluttered space decorated with dozens of labor movement posters.
As impressive were their problems and complaints. All said they had either overstayed their visas, been injured on the job and left to fend for
themselves, or had not received wages promised them.
"When I had my accident on the job last December, my employer just dropped me off at the hospital," said Geronimo Lutsiang, a 51-year-old Filipino who did demolition work on construction sites. "Since then, he hasn't paid me any of the money he owes me.
"My right hand is useless now, and there's no way I can survive without work in Japan, the most expensive place in the world."
If the central government has yet to grapple with the issue of immigration and the needs of the foreign workers already in Japan, in the modest city of Himeji, where the Vietnamese community numbers about 1,000, the future is now.
Here in a cluster of five-story buildings on the edge of the city live many of the Vietnamese immigrants who work nearby in the leather factories that were once the main employers of Japan's untouchables, the burakumin.
Masahiro Iba, an official in the prefecture's public housing department, explained that relations were badly strained between Japanese and foreign residents of the city's low-rise apartment complexes.
"Integration is easy to call for, but it is very difficult to achieve," he said. "You just can't tell people that they must adjust to others."
The Japanese residents complained that the Vietnamese parked their cars illegally, paid no heed to strict garbage dumping rules and often sang karaoke loudly late at night.
But a remedy was eventually worked out through countless meetings and visits by city officials. The housing complexes have recently set an informal 10 percent limit on the numbers of Vietnamese in any one building.
"I've lived both before the war and after, so I've seen a lot," said Fusae Hirata, a 78-year-old widower, who is the president of the complex's association for elderly residents. "I try to be stern with people when they are doing something wrong, even if it means they will hate me, but I also give praise when things are done well.
"We are not refusing to take foreigners. We've all got the same red blood, and as long as we can communicate, things will be fine."
Howard W. French
The New York Times
Thursday, July 24, 2003
Changes for Japan
HIMEJI, Japan With their tidy suburban home, a late-model Toyota in the driveway and two school-age children whose Japanese is indistinguishable from any native's, Akio Nakashima and his wife, Yoshie, are the perfect immigrants.
Though Vietnamese by origin, as fellow Asians they would be hard to pick out in a crowd. Through years of diligent study they have mastered this country's difficult language. Although they incurred the ire of their parents, they even adopted Japanese names in order to assimilate better.
Outside of the workplace, however, in 21 years in this Japan, where they arrived as boat people in 1982, the Nakashimas have never managed to make friends in this country. Even that is a petty concern compared to the worry that troubles their sleep.
"As far as my life goes, it doesn't matter if I am Vietnamese or Japanese," said Akio Nakashima, a 36-year-old engineer at a tire factory. "My biggest worry is prejudice and discrimination against my children. We pay the same taxes as anyone else, but will our children be able to work for a big company, or get jobs as civil servants?"
Many economists and demographers, both here and abroad, say that Japan's success or failure in addressing the concerns of immigrants like the Nakashimas will go a long way toward determining whether this country remains an economic powerhouse or its population shrivels and the slow fade of the Japanese economy turns into a rout.
Japan is at the leading edge of a phenomenon that is beginning to strike many advanced countries - rapidly aging populations and dwindling birth rates. Japan's country's work force peaked in 1998, and has since entered a decline that experts expect to accelerate.
By midcentury, according to demographers, Japan will have 30 percent fewer people, and one million 100-year-olds. By that time, 800,000 more people will die each year than are born.
And by century's end, according to United Nations estimates, the present-day population of 120 million will be cut in half.
Better integrating women into the workplace may help in the short term, but experts say the only hope for stabilizing the population is massive immigration, sustained over many years.
Failing this, the potentially disastrous consequences are not only about a scarcity of workers or falling demand, but an outright collapse of the pension system, as the tax base shrinks and the elderly population booms.
Speaking before Parliament earlier this year, Japan's finance minister warned of just such a collapse, before he later, unconvincingly, retracted his comments as too alarming.
In order to restore demographic equilibrium here, Japan would need 17 million new immigrants by 2050, according to a recent United Nations report.
Japan, however, is the most tenaciously insular of all the world's top industrial countries, and deeply conservative notions about ethnic purity and what it means to be Japanese make it extraordinarily hard for even experts here to envision massive immigration. At 17 million, the immigrants would represent 18 percent of the population in a country where immigrants now amount to only 1 percent.
Even that modest figure merits an asterisk, because it consists mostly of second- and third-generation Koreans and Chinese, descendants of people brought to Japan when it maintained colonies on the Asian mainland. As the Nakashimas, from Vietnam, know all too well, even long-term immigrants face frequent discrimination and are not accepted as "real" Japanese.
"The kind of figures the demographers talk about are unimaginable for Japan," said Hiroshi Komai, a population expert at Tsukuba University. "In a quarter century, we have only absorbed one million immigrants.
"Societies have always risen and faded," he added, "and Japan will likely disappear and something else will take its place, but that's not such a problem. Greece and Rome disappeared, too."
Komai's belief that Japan cannot absorb newcomers is free of the strident nativism that is common among the conservative political leadership, like the governor of Tokyo, Shintaro Ishihara, who once warned of "genetic pollution" from China.
Rather, he insists, it grows out of a realistic appraisal of his society's social limitations, including those of its workplace culture and educational system.
English-language skills in Japan, for example, rank along with North Korea's as among the worst in Asia, making it difficult for Japan to attract international talent to its universities. For the same reason, Japanese diplomas have little international portability.
Because of these issues and the society's enduring insularity, Komai said, the country could probably absorb no more than 200,000 newcomers over the next decade, a far cry from what the experts say is needed.
The government appears to agree, and has planned only to encourage a kind of "high-end" immigration that would be limited to elites with specialized knowledge or skills.
Many critics say, however, that even that strategy may fail, as Japan is increasingly incapable of competing for foreign brainpower, not only against the United States and Western Europe, but against South Korea and China, which are seen as lands of far greater opportunity.
In a much-noted recent speech, Hiroshi Okuda, president of the Japanese Business Federation, made an implicit appeal for broader immigration by pointing to the experience of the United States.
"People stress the fruit of the IT revolution for the drastic economic advance of the United States during the 1990's," he said. "But we cannot overlook the fact that the influx of foreigners at a rate of a million per year supported this economic growth."
New immigrants, he added, should bear the tax burden of supporting Japan's social security system.
The government's stated preference for highly skilled immigrants also runs up against tradition here, which has always favored allowing small numbers of immigrants to perform dirty, dangerous and difficult jobs, known as Three-K work here, after the equivalent Japanese words, which all begin with K.
In these sectors, signs are multiplying that pragmatic thinking and downright necessity are beginning to win out over hidebound official planning, as small communities of immigrants, albeit mostly illegal ones, take root.
Already, the construction industry makes wide use of immigrants, mostly from other Asian countries, to fill the most dangerous and low-paying jobs.
"We have already reached the point where the Japanese economy cannot function without foreign workers," said Mioko Honda, a leader of the two-year-old Union of Migrant Workers.
"The construction companies use Thais and Filipinos by day, because they are inconspicuous, and Africans and others are used at night, or in factory work."
The integration of these workers has been less than perfect. Honda's group was founded to help illegal foreign workers recover salary or benefits owed to them by unscrupulous employees.
A visit to one of the union's offices, in Kawasaki, an industrial city near Tokyo, turned up a impressively varied group of immigrants - from Peru, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, the Philippines and Bolivia - chatting and waiting for help amid the cluttered space decorated with dozens of labor movement posters.
As impressive were their problems and complaints. All said they had either overstayed their visas, been injured on the job and left to fend for
themselves, or had not received wages promised them.
"When I had my accident on the job last December, my employer just dropped me off at the hospital," said Geronimo Lutsiang, a 51-year-old Filipino who did demolition work on construction sites. "Since then, he hasn't paid me any of the money he owes me.
"My right hand is useless now, and there's no way I can survive without work in Japan, the most expensive place in the world."
If the central government has yet to grapple with the issue of immigration and the needs of the foreign workers already in Japan, in the modest city of Himeji, where the Vietnamese community numbers about 1,000, the future is now.
Here in a cluster of five-story buildings on the edge of the city live many of the Vietnamese immigrants who work nearby in the leather factories that were once the main employers of Japan's untouchables, the burakumin.
Masahiro Iba, an official in the prefecture's public housing department, explained that relations were badly strained between Japanese and foreign residents of the city's low-rise apartment complexes.
"Integration is easy to call for, but it is very difficult to achieve," he said. "You just can't tell people that they must adjust to others."
The Japanese residents complained that the Vietnamese parked their cars illegally, paid no heed to strict garbage dumping rules and often sang karaoke loudly late at night.
But a remedy was eventually worked out through countless meetings and visits by city officials. The housing complexes have recently set an informal 10 percent limit on the numbers of Vietnamese in any one building.
"I've lived both before the war and after, so I've seen a lot," said Fusae Hirata, a 78-year-old widower, who is the president of the complex's association for elderly residents. "I try to be stern with people when they are doing something wrong, even if it means they will hate me, but I also give praise when things are done well.
"We are not refusing to take foreigners. We've all got the same red blood, and as long as we can communicate, things will be fine."
