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Foreign Worker Solidarity Day
Yesterday, March 22nd, three unions: NUGW Tokyo Nambu, Kanagawa City Union, and Zentoitsu Workers Union joined forces in an action-packed day of five demonstrations. The day’s actions were in response to unresolved disputes ranging from dismissals, including two dismissals for pregnancy, to union busting and threats of dismissal, to unpaid wages and passport confiscation. The…
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Japan’s Worsening Population Crisis
“It’s almost taboo to raise the issue of mass immigration here,” [Hidenori Sakanaka, former head of the Tokyo Immigration Bureau] says. “Japan has no experience of this, only of sending people abroad. Modern Japan almost totally shuts out foreigners and the only people who debate the issue are specialists. Nobody is even researching it.” http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/fl20060321zg.html
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Hard lessons in broken English
“A lot of people see the advertisements ? and think it will be like schoolroom teaching and lots of fun, but when you get here it is more like doing factory line work,” he says. “The whole teaching-English-in-Japan thing is a complete fraud and the experience can be quite bitter.” But for anyone set on…
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Japan should aggressively accept foreign workers
Hiroshi Okuda, chairman of the influential Japan Business Federation, said Monday Japan should accept foreign laborers “in all business categories” to cope with a shortage of labor in the near future. As Japan’s labor population will begin to decrease by 1 million a year after 2010, it will be difficult to overcome a resultant labor…
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Equality still has a long way to go
Louis Carlet, deputy general secretary of the 2,600-member National Union of General Workers Tokyo Nambu (to which some Japan Times employees belong), agreed. It is always those women in less stable situations who bear the brunt of negative trends in the economy, he said. “When companies downsize, or when they shift toward fixed-term contracts, the…
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Two Colleges Drop ID Requirement For Foreign Applicants
Two colleges, one in Fukuoka Prefecture and the other in Tokyo, have stopped requiring non-Japanese applicants to submit identification certificates, following complaints that it is a discriminatory practice, school officials said Thursday. Kyushu Dental College in Kitakyushu, Fukuoka Prefecture, made the decision after a South Korean resident of Japan complained to the college that the…
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March In March 2006
400 foreigners in a simultaneous demonstration seeking job security and an end to discrimination. http://www.asahi.com/national/update/0305/TKY200603050119.html The Asahi Shimbun reported on the web Sunday evening and in their morning print edition. In fact, many of the Asahi’s “400 foreigners” were Japanese, who joined foreigners in what is the beginning of a civil rights movement in Japan.…
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Japan needs, but does not welcome, migrant help
About 1.9 million foreigners are registered in Japan. Combined with illegal entries, non-Japanese make up 1.5 percent of Japan?s population, a tiny proportion compared to immigrant populations in Europe and North America. The challenges so familiar to officials in the US, Europe and Australia are thus relatively new in Japan. Official policy has not come…
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Thinking of teaching in Japan?
Most people, when they first arrive, work at a place like Nova, probably the biggest employer of native English teachers in the world. By dint of their overseas recruiting programme, NO-VAcation (as we called it when I worked there) is the first employer for many arriving in Japan. But even this has changed. Recently, after…
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Report of the Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance
United Nations Special Rapporteur Doudou Diène’s report on his official mission to survey racial discrimination and xenophobia in Japan has been published by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. His recommendations include: 94. The Government should adopt appropriate measures to guarantee that foreigners are treated equally in Japan. It should…