Foreigners settling in Japan? For centuries, Japan has not only been one of the most closed societies in the world, it has viewed that insularity as a source of economic strength and cultural superiority. Not long ago politicians were celebrating Japan’s racial purity and warning that gaijin (foreigners) would threaten the country’s stability. In 1986 the then prime minister, Yasuhiro Nakasone, reportedly told colleagues that America’s “intellectual level” was beneath Japan’s because of “people like blacks, Mexicans and Puerto Ricans.”
But that was when Japan dominated the global economy. Now, America’s economy rules, thanks in part to immigrant brains and hustle, and Tokyo’s is in a decadelong funk. The sluggish economy and a demographic crisis–Japan’s birthrate is the lowest in the G7–have at last forced a national immigration debate. Undocumented immigrants like the Idehloos have been tolerated, as long they were willing to forgo legal rights; now a consensus is emerging that the immigration system should be modified to permit outsiders to reside legally in Japan. In the meantime more and more foreigners are arriving–and staying.
These newcomers do so-called 3-K jobs: work that’s kitsui (hard), kitanai (dirty) and kiken (dangerous). Their sweat now ensures the survival of such key industries as autos, electronics and food processing. No one knows for sure how many immigrants there are. About 1.5 million foreigners reside legally among Japan’s 120 million citizens. Labor-rights groups estimate that an additional 500,000 undocumented aliens live and work in the country.
Ethnic enclaves, a mix of legal and illegal immigrants, have sprung up everywhere. There’s a Chinatown in Yokohama, a community of Koreans in Osaka and a large Shanghai-Chinese settlement in Tokyo’s Shinjuku Ward. In nearby Ikibukuro, Tokyo’s answer to New York City’s Lower East Side, immigrants cluster to work, play, eat and worship. Down one alley near the train station, a five-story walk-up hosts (bottom to top) a Ghanaian-owned sportswear store, an Indian restaurant, an Irish pub, a South Asian video shop, and a mosque. Increasingly, Japanese authorities tolerate these growing pockets of diversity. Several industrial cities even court new blood by offering bilingual education and other migrant-friendly services.
The largest group of legal immigrants is, in fact, Japanese. Known as Nikkeijin, they are second- and third-generation descendants of Japanese who fled overpopulation at home and settled in Latin America. By the end of 1998, according to official statistics, some 222,000 Brazilians and 41,000 Peruvians had established residency in Japan since Tokyo opened the door to Nikkeijin in 1989. Last year an estimated 60,000 newcomers arrived. Envisioned as a labor source that wouldn’t threaten Japan’s monoculture, Nikkeijin proved to be as foreign as their passports. In Oizumi, a small industrial town 50 miles northwest of Tokyo, Latinos make up nearly 12 percent of the population. The Oizumi version of bento, the traditional Japanese lunch boxes, features braised beef, Brazilian rice, salad and sausage. “Our hardware is Japanese, but our software is Brazilian,” says Angelo Ishi, a journalist and university lecturer who moved to Japan from So Paulo in 1990.
Most Japanese concede they need immigrants. A new United Nations study warns that Japan must bring in 600,000 foreign laborers a year to maintain current levels of economic output. The government has quietly used legal loopholes to fill the labor gap, recruiting foreigners for work-study schemes and training programs designed to “perpetuate the myth of temporariness,” says Wayne Cornelius, an immigration expert at the University of California, San Diego. In fact, many “graduates” of these programs stay on in Japan and enter an illegal labor pool. Then there are the Nikkeijin and tens of thousands of foreign brides imported to marry Japanese farmers.
Officialdom is finally taking up the issue. Politicians on the left, right and center have started advocating long-term residency rights, and even citizenship, for foreign workers. In January former prime minister Keizo Obuchi’s Commission on Japan’s Goals in the 21st Century endorsed creating “an explicit immigration and permanent residency system.” According to surveys conducted by scholars and Japan’s major media, a majority support the idea, despite palpable fears that migrants–especially illegal aliens–bring crime. Under pressure from industry, the immigration bureau recently expanded its technical internship programs from 17 to 59 work categories, adding tasks like roofing, bookbinding and knitting. “It is already a fact that foreign workers are a part of our society,” a senior bureaucrat says. “It’s natural for them to settle in Japan, and we can’t stop it anymore.”
Idehloo hopes that’s true. Like thousands of undocumented aliens, he and his family still live at the edges of the law. Risking deportation, the family surrendered to authorities last December and requested permission to reside in Japan legally. In a landmark case, Japan’s Ministry of Justice, citing “humanitarian concerns,” recently granted residency to a handful of undocumented foreign families with children in Japanese schools. Even Shintaro Ishihara, Tokyo’s populist governor (and the author of the anti-U.S. diatribe “The Japan That Can Say No”), says Japan should consider granting amnesty to illegal aliens. Mitsuhiro Kimura, president of a large right-wing patriotic association, goes further. “I myself don’t mind having Iranian Japanese,” he says. “Japan is not a homogeneous country.” Not anymore.
title: “The Japan That Can Say Yes” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-26” author: “Mark Brown”
A Japanese melting pot? Japan once had little room for gaijin, or foreigners, especially those who dig ditches or work in factories. It wasn’t long ago that Japanese politicians celebrated their country’s racial purity and blamed America’s open-door immigration policies for everything from urban crime to low math scores. In 1986 the then prime minister, Yasuhiro Nakasone, reportedly told colleagues that America’s “intellectual level” was beneath Japan’s because of “people like blacks, Mexicans and Puerto Ricans.” Now, America’s economy rules, thanks in part to immigrant brains and hustle. Japan, in the meantime, has suffered through a decadelong slump. Not only is the economy sluggish, but Japan is aging rapidly and facing a severe labor shortage. To fill the job gap, Japan is becoming increasingly reliant on those it once scorned–foreigners, who’ve washed over Japan in recent years. Idehloo and his family have found a place in society largely because of Japan’s demographic crisis. A new United Nations study warns that Japan must bring in 600,000 foreign laborers a year just to maintain current levels of economic output. Despite restrictive policies, the migrants are arriving–and transforming Japan into a more multicultural society.
Immigration is such political dynamite that the government has largely ignored the changes that are sweeping the country. Though the foreigners are quietly pouring in, Tokyo has stuck to its near-blanket ban on permanent immigration. That’s because admitting that foreign workers are a positive force–and officially letting them in–would challenge familiar notions that Japan is a closed, homogeneous society. Fearful of a backlash, Japan’s politicians are inching toward a real policy debate. “Sooner or later,” writes Takao Nakagawa of the Asahi Shimbun, “Japan will have to face squarely the question of how to accept immigrants.”
Idehloo’s story underscores the need for clear policies. Like thousands of undocumented aliens, he and his family still live at the edges of the law, without health insurance or other benefits, fearing a knock at the door from police or immigration officials. Risking deportation, the family surrendered to authorities last December and requested permission to reside in Japan legally. Activists say immigrants in enclaves all around the country are yearning for legal recognition, too. Many Japanese support their struggle and want the government to lift its laws against immigration. In a landmark case, Japan’s Ministry of Justice, citing “humanitarian concerns,” recently granted residency to a handful of undocumented foreign families with children in Japanese schools. “This has never happened before,” explains human-rights activist Katsuo Yoshinari. “It is all about how we envision Japan’s future.”
Skirting the more fundamental debate about opening up society, the government has quietly used legal loopholes to fill the yawning labor gap. Tokyo has recruited foreigners for work-study schemes and training programs designed to “perpetuate the myth of temporariness,” says Wayne Cornelius, an immigration expert at the University of California, San Diego. In fact, many “graduates” of these programs stay on in Japan and enter an illegal labor pool, which has grown to some 500,000. That tally doesn’t include a swelling population of Latinos with Japanese ancestry, or tens of thousands of foreign brides imported to marry Japanese farmers. On farms, aboard fishing boats and in factories across the country, these newcomers do so-called 3-K jobs, work that’s kitsui (hard), kitanai (dirty) and kiken (dangerous). Their sweat now ensures the survival of key industries such as the auto industry, electronics and food processing.
Remarkably, some politicians have started advocating long-term residency rights, and even citizenship, for foreign workers. In January, for example, former prime minister Keizo Obuchi’s Commission on Japan’s Goals in the 21st Century endorsed creating “an explicit immigration and permanent-residency system” to rationalize treatment of foreign labor. According to numerous surveys going back a decade, some done by the media, others by scholars, a majority of Japanese support the idea. In an interview with NEWSWEEK (following story), even Tokyo’s populist governor, Shintaro Ishihara, who has made racist comments in the past, says Japan should consider granting amnesty to undocumented aliens. Mitsuhiro Kimura, president of a large far-right patriotic association, goes even further. “I myself don’t mind having Iranian Japanese,” he says. “Japan is not a homogeneous country.”
The opening began in Japan’s farming hinterland, traditionally the most conservative sector of the country. During the 1960s local women started fleeing the countryside to find factory jobs in the city, leading to a “hollowing out” of Japan’s farm communities. Across Japan, first-born sons were inheriting farms to face permanent bachelorhood. Rice growers–long esteemed as the bedrock of traditional society–saw rural communities collapsing in a single generation. To solve the problem, Shigeya Mori, who was then a bureaucrat in Okura, a mountain hamlet three hours by bullet train north of Tokyo, floated a plan in 1985 to import brides. “I was skeptical,” he remembers. “What totally surprised me was that local elders were very, very eager.” The village dispatched matchmakers to the Philippines and imported 35 brides, before handing the task to the private sector. News of the hamlet’s radical solution spawned copycats from Hokkaido to Okinawa.
Gloria Bautista was one of the first Filipina brides to arrive in Okura. A waitress in the Philippines in 1985, she agreed “out of curiosity” to meet eligible Japanese farmers visiting her country to seek brides. “She had a cute face,” remembers Masatoshi Kakizaki, now her husband. “He looked like a gangster,” she jokes, nudging him playfully. At first Bautista carried dictionaries, struggled to acquire a taste for soy sauce and endured nosy neighbors. “It took me three years to communicate,” she says. Today she divides her time between three daughters, the family’s buckwheat fields and a part-time job in town. More than 2,000 foreign women have married farmers in Yamagata Prefecture alone. Although officials won’t release the national tally, experts say farm brides account for many of the 265,000 foreigners currently holding spouse visas. “Around here there are Filipinos, Brazilians and Chinese–hundreds of them,” says a Tianjin-born farm bride who lives near Okura. “The brides prove we can coexist,” says the former official Mori, now an associate professor at Tohoku University of Art and Design. “Today we accept foreign brides for our farmers but not foreign workers for our factories. It’s a contradiction, isn’t it?”
Industrial policy, indeed, lags way behind the farmers’. Over the last two decades, Japan Inc. has exported low-end manufacturing plants overseas, outfitted remaining factories with advanced robotics and expanded recruitment among women and the elderly. At first few Japanese companies pushed for the right to bring in immigrant workers. But by the late 1980s labor had grown so scarce that the shortage threatened all major industries. Businesses began clamoring for help. Tokyo’s response: in 1989 it opened the door to foreigners, but only those with Japanese blood.
Known as Nikkeijin, these second- and third-generation descendants of Japanese migrants to Latin America have stampeded in. According to official statistics, some 222,000 Brazilians and 41,000 Peruvians have established residency in Japan since Tokyo opened the door in 1989. Last year an estimated 60,000 newcomers joined them as reverse migration intensified. Typically, a Nikkeijin earns $2,500 a month in a Japanese factory, more than even doctors, lawyers and professors in Brazil.
The Nikkeijin are already changing society. Envisioned as a labor source that wouldn’t threaten the country’s monoculture, Nikkeijin proved to be as foreign as their passports. “Our hardware is Japanese, but our software is Brazilian,” says Angelo Ishi, a journalist and university lecturer who moved to Japan from So Paulo in 1990. In Oizumi, a small industrial town 50 miles northwest of Tokyo, Latinos make up nearly 12 percent of the population. The boutiques, butcher shops, travel agencies, video-rental shops and music stores in the Brazilian Plaza mall all cater to Latin immigrants. In Oizumi, traditional bento, or Japanese lunchboxes, come stuffed with New World fare, like braised beef, Brazilian rice, salad and sausage. At carnival time every summer, immigrants parade through town dressed in feathers and G-strings to a pounding samba beat.
Across Japan, ethnic enclaves are cropping up. There’s a Chinatown in Yokohama, a community of Koreans in Osaka and a large Shanghai-Chinese settlement in Tokyo’s Shinjuku Ward. In nearby Ikibukuro, Tokyo’s answer to New York’s Lower East Side, immigrants cluster to work, play, dine–and also worship. Down one alley near the train station, a five-story walk-up hosts (bottom to top) a Ghanaian-owned sportswear store, an Indian restaurant, an Irish pub, a halal food and South Asian video shop, and a mosque where the faithful prostrate toward Mecca six times a day. Amid this multicultural wedding cake, a flier posted at Bobby’s Bar advertises for a waitress. It reads: wanted: cheerful, outgoing female–any nationality or experience. Nearly 18,000 foreigners live in the industrial city of Hamamatsu–and many work in the city’s factories. In the factories, Cornelius, director of the University of California-San Diego Center for Comparative Immigration Studies, found “an aging and gradually disappearing Japanese work force.” Japanese manufacturers “have a very limited set of options,” he concludes. When it comes to foreign workers, “they’re hooked.”
Which is why Japan now draws immigrants from all over the planet. Wei, a Chinese from Fujian province, came in search of a better life. After 10 years on a demolition crew that dug tunnels for China’s railway system, he hunted for ways to get a visa to Japan. Finally he found a loophole and entered as a student cook in 1993. When the work-study visa expired, Wei and his family, who came with him, went underground outside Tokyo. He worked as a short- order cook and raised his family in one tiny room covered in tatami mats. His daughter, now a seventh grader, is ranked near the top of her class. “Without legal visas, there’s not much we can do,” he says, sipping coffee before work. “But if we get them, we’ll probably open a restaurant.”
Not everyone finds a land of plenty. Even as Tokyo expands the scope of its training schemes to allow in more workers, the number stealing ashore illegally on fishing boats is holding steady. Crime committed by foreigners has risen. But according to media and university surveys, a majority of Japanese have accepted foreign workers–a support rate higher, experts say, than that measured in the world’s model immigration nation, the United States. Perhaps the two aren’t so different. In Japan’s oldest ethnic enclaves, a distinctly American pattern has emerged: old immigrants assimilate into mainstream society, to be replaced by newcomers. Take Osaka’s handmade-shoe industry. Once dominated by Koreans brought to Japan before World War II, it later attracted workers from South Korea. Today the city’s leather factories lure workers from China. Things are changing, slowly. Under pressure from industry, the government recently expanded its technical internship program from 17 to 59 categories, adding tasks like roofing, bookbinding and knitting. “It is already a plain and simple fact that foreign workers are a part of our society,” a senior bureaucrat says. “It’s natural for them to come and settle in Japan, and we can’t stop it anymore.” At least for now, you can still get good sushi.
