Insular Japan Needs, but Resists, Immigration
July 24, 2003
By HOWARD W. FRENCH
HIMEJI, Japan - With their tidy suburban home here, 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 out in a crowd. Through years of diligent
study they have mastered this country's difficult language.
They even adopted Japanese names.
Outside the workplace, though, in 21 years in this country,
where they arrived as boat people in 1982, the Nakashimas
have never managed to make friends. Even that is a petty
concern compared with the worry that troubles their sleep.
"As far as my life goes, it doesn't matter if I am
Vietnamese or Japanese," said Mr. Nakashima, 36, an
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 here and abroad say
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
its 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 fertility. The size of this
country's work force peaked in 1998 and has since entered a
decline that experts expect to accelerate.
By midcentury, demographers say, Japan will have 30 percent
fewer people, and one million 100-year-olds. By then,
800,000 more people will die each year than are born. By
century's end, the United Nations estimates, the present
population of 120 million will be cut in half.
Better integration of women into the workplace may help in
the short term, but experts say the only hope for
stabilizing the population is large-scale immigration,
sustained over many years.
Failing that, the consequences could include not only a
scarcity of workers and falling demand, but also a collapse
of the pension system as the tax base shrinks and the
elderly population booms.
To stave off such a disaster, Japan would need 17 million
new immigrants by 2050, according to a recent United
Nations report. Other estimates have said Japan would need
400,000 new immigrants each year.
But Japan is the most tenaciously insular of all the
world's top industrial countries, and deeply conservative
notions about ethnic purity make it hard for even the
experts here to envision large-scale immigration.
Seventeen million immigrants, as the United Nations
forecasts, would represent 18 percent of the population in
a country where immigrants now amount to only one percent.
Even that modest figure consists mostly of second- and
third-generation Koreans and Chinese whose ancestors were
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, and Japan will
likely disappear and something else will take its place,
but that's not such a problem. Greece and Rome disappeared
too."
Mr. Komai's belief that Japan cannot absorb newcomers is
free of the nativism that is common among members of the
conservative political leadership. Rather, he insists, it
grows out of a realistic appraisal of his country'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 among the worst in Asia, making it
difficult to attract international talent to its
universities.
Because of those issues and the society's insularity, Mr.
Komai said, the country can 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 to
encourage only a kind of "high end" immigration that would
be limited to those with specialized knowledge or skills.
Many critics say 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
also 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. "People stress the fruit of the
I.T. 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." The
government's stated preference for highly skilled
immigrants also runs up against tradition, which has always
favored allowing small numbers of immigrants to perform
dirty, dangerous and difficult jobs.
In those sectors, signs are multiplying that pragmatic
thinking is beginning to win out, as small, mostly illegal
communities of immigrants take root here and there.
Already the construction industry makes widespread 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 even these workers has been less than
perfect, and points to the challenges ahead. Mr. Honda's
group was founded to help illegal foreign workers recover
wages or benefits owed them by unscrupulous employers.
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.
As impressive were their problems and complaints. All said
they had overstayed their visas, had 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, 51, a 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, 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
this city about 275 miles west of Tokyo live many of the
Vietnamese immigrants who work nearby in the leather
factories that were once the main employer of Japan's own
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 - a tipping
point, as it were.
"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 elderly residents' association.
"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."
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/24/international/asia/24JAPA.html?ex=1060068661&ei=1&en=16787bf870c62297
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