世論 What Japan Thinks

As a change for today, I’ll have a look at the recent report (note: Microsoft Word document) released by the UN’s Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance, Doudou Diène, on his mission to Japan, casting my eye in particular over some of the statistics that appear in this report. This seems to be a draft, so hopefully it gets rewritten before the official release.

Note that of course I am in favour of Japanese legislation against most forms of racial discrimination, but I am a bit sceptical of some of the methods employed by some of the activists, and I can see in this document hints of these tactics that I dislike.

Note also that I am a white guy with a full-time 正社員, seishain post at a major Japanese firm and a Permenant Residency permit, so feel free to take that into account when reading my position.

Finally note that calling into doubt the exact scale or shape of various forms of discrimination does not mean I am denying that it exists at all or that it is a problem. In particular, the description of the Koreans’ living conditions in Utoro is shocking!

First, one major problem I have with this document (although it seems to be an advance copy) is that there is just one single footnote or reference; where the data he often quotes comes from is not explained, in my eyes weakening such an important document.

6. The “Ryukyu Kingdom”, maintained by the Okinawa people from the fourteenth century, was conquered by the Government of Japan and annexed in 1879. This produced various colonialist and assimilative policies, such as the prohibition of Ryukyu dialects, traditional customs, religious faith and lifestyle. Since 1972, the majority of the United States bases in Japan have been concentrated in Okinawa, which covers only 0.6 per cent of Japanese territory, affecting the environment, indigenous culture and custom of the Okinawa people.

According to a quick search, the majority of bases are not in Okinawa. It has the most bases, and a majority of the land set aside for bases, but a majority in terms of numbers.

Also, the 27 years that the USA occupied the islands is never mentioned, although I would have thought that that would be a contributary factor to attitudes in the islands.

22. The Ministry of Land and Infrastructure, in charge of the Ainu policy, indicated that there are 24,000 Ainu in Japan, according to the last census.

What census was this? The regular national census does not (and has never, as far as I am aware) include a question on race, only nationality.

26. The 1997 law concerns the Ainu culture but does not touch upon the promotion of their human rights. In this regard, the Ministry of Land and Infrastructure indicated that the Japanese Constitution guarantees equality before the law of each Japanese. Therefore, the demands of the Ainu people to get recognition of the rights as indigenous peoples cannot be satisfied, as this would be in breach of the Constitution.

An interesting conundrum. Does Mr Diène invisage the Japanese changing their constitution? How do other countries resolve this?

29. In Osaka Prefecture, there are 212,590 foreigners: one inhabitant out of 40 is a foreigner, 69 per cent of whom are Koreans. Many of these were brought to Japan forcibly during the past colonial rule and their descendants. Other nationalities include the Chinese (38,554), Filipinos (5,161), Brazilians (4,758), Americans (2,613), Peruvians (1,200) and Africans (551). The prefecture indicated that discriminatory incidents against foreigners occur at the time of recruitment or when renting a house and most frequently involve Koreans and Chinese. In September 1994, an incident was reported of an African-American male who was refused entry to a shop.

I was unaware that America (he means USA, perhaps?) and Africa were nations. As expected, discrimination cases against Chinese and Koreans are the most frequent since they represent 87% of the foreign population. About the final sentence, this refers to the Steve McGowan case, which is not as clear-cut as some of the main supporters try to point out.

30. In addition, there are Koreans who use Japanese names against their will to avoid discrimination. In primary school, only 14.2 per cent of the Korean children use their Korean name. In secondary school, only 9 per cent.

I’m not sure what exactly this means, and I’d love to see the original research. There are practical reasons why they might not use their Korean names: take one of the most famous Koreans on Japanese TV, Yoon (or Yun) Son Ha. Note English also cannot agree how to spell her name, and the first hanja character of her name, 尹, is not a character approved for names in Japan (I think), therefore she cannot use her real name in a legal context in Japan. In addition, the true pronounciation of her name may be tricky for the average person, so her adopted Japanese moniker, ユンソナ, Yunsona is what she uses in Japan. Thus there are perfectly valid reasons why people do not use their Korean name, much the same as Russians in the West cannot use Cyrillic script on their driving licences. Even I prefer using Ken here, as although my legal name is Kenneth, the average Japanese has problems with pronouncing the “th”, and the official transliteration to “ケネス”, Kenesu sounds awful to my ears.

Also, the wording of the quoted paragraph is misleading; a superficial reading might suggest that 91% of all Koreans in secondary school (let’s ignore that there is no secondary school as such in Japan) are discriminated against. This style of deliberate leading to an erroneous conclusion does annoy me.

36. The Buraku community indicated that discrimination against them still exists and is even increasing, while nationalism rises in the current political context. The daily manifestations include graffiti, posters and Internet messages insulting Buraku people, treating them as dirty and requesting them to leave, and discriminatory practices, mainly in the field of employment and marriage. Employers continue to enquire on the origins of the job applicants, but there is no local or national legislation that prohibits this practice, except for the prefectures of Osaka, Fukuoka, Kumamoto, Tokushima, Kagawa and Tottori. Regrettably, the “Buraku lists” are also used by marriage partners, who inquire as to the origins of their future spouse. According to a recent survey, 78 per cent of the population of Osaka indicated that they would see a marriage with Buraku people as problematic: this shows how profound the discriminatory mentality against Buraku people is.

This is the same sort of writing as I deplored in paragraph 30 above. There is a lot of leading sentence structure, but with nothing to back up the implied accusations. There is a concrete 78%, but what was the question that lead to that answer? Without seeing the fieldwork for the study, it is difficult to form solid conclusions from even so high a figure.

43. The Ainu community feels the discrimination against it very strongly. According to a 1999 survey conducted by the Hokkaido prefectural government, 28.1 per cent of the people interviewed indicated that they had experienced discrimination or known someone who had experienced discrimination. The situations in which discrimination was experienced were, in order, at school, regarding marriage and at the workplace.

I presume this survey was carried out amongst the Ainu only. 28.1% is quite a high number, but note that it represents a count of those who may know someone who has been discriminated against. If we assumed, for instance, that each Ainu had 10 friends, a figure as low as 3% of the sample size may personally have been discriminated against.

48. [...] But teachers do not teach the reality about the Ainu culture and history at school. On the contrary, many of them continue to transmit the same discriminatory image of the Ainu being inferior, for example by saying in front of a class that Ainu children can only count to 10.

Here we go again. “Many” teachers? How many?

50. Finally, the Ainu are absent in the national political sphere: there was only one Ainu parliamentarian in the past, whom the Special Rapporteur has met, and none at present. The Ainu have requested a quota of parliamentarians reserved for the Ainu community.

Given that there are only 50,000 or so Ainu according to the survey, and with 750 members in both houses representing the 127 million Japanese, or about 170,000 people per member, I can’t really see any democratic sense in having a quota of one every three parliaments. What would be better, however, would be to get the major parties to commit to some pledge to develop Ainu representives at all levels of government.

52. [...regarding Okinawa...]Also, several cases of women being raped and killed by American military officers have occurred, as well as of young schoolgirls being sexually harassed. On those occasions, the Government said it would take appropriate measures, but thereafter nothing was done.

Although I am no fan of the USA or the military, this really annoyed me, and I think borders on anti-Americanism! At a casual read, this suggests that the national government uses the US army to cow the population, allowing them to rape and pillage the islanders at will. However, the measure that the government did not take was, I believe, a rewrite of the SoFA rules, not the implied lack of legal action against the perpetrator. Also, I believe this sort of scaremongering reporting is just the same kind that is condemned later on in paragraph 60 below.

60. [...]Discriminatory statements against foreigners are made by some public officials. The police disseminate posters and flyers in which foreigners are assimilated to thieves.

The first sentence gets a some qualifier, but not the second. Why? The evidence I have seen is that these posters have only been isolated incidents in a few police forces that were corrected once the errors were pointed out.

64. [...] However, it is important to note that the Assembly members of a number of municipalities concerned, including the Otaru Assembly, despite having been requested by interested groups to draft and adopt ordinances which would allow the authorities under the local jurisdiction to prosecute such offences, and despite having the competence to do it, have not done so, referring to the difficulty to do it in the absence of a national law which contemplates such offences.

I have seen a draft of the proposed but rejected bill, and it was a nightmare in many respects. One clause that springs to mind was the ability for any foreign school pupil to demand education to the level he or she might get at “home”, which may place an almost limitless financial burden on the local authority, for instance:

2) National and local public entities must utilize all appropriate methods in an effort to fulfill the special needs associated with specific Racial Groups, including opportunities to receive ethnic education, education of native languages, and education of the Japanese language.

3) In no form and at no stage will education include content which encourages Racial Discrimination. In particular, school-based education must be oriented towards the elimination of racial discrimination.

The phrases like “ethnic education” are never defined. Outlawing “content which encourages Racial Discrimination” would hamper critical studies of propaganda, for instance. In addition, from what I hear about Chinese and Korean education systems, 2 and 3 are mutually exclusive.

65. The Special Rapporteur was briefed about a case of a golf club refusing membership to foreigners in which the court ruled that such a refusal was acceptable: [...]

A good number of golf clubs the world over are discriminating, of course.

67. The Special Rapporteur was also informed that the majority of the foreigners working in Japan have no job security and some of them are in a situation of overstay. Foreigners mostly work for many years with short-term contracts, and have no appropriate medical coverage.

Sorry, I have no sympathy for the majority of overstayers. Now, no job security refers to the fact that the vast majority of foreigners never stay more than three years anyway, so tend to get signed up on one-year contracts. The lack of medical coverage is due to firms breaking the law, with NOVA in particular recently getting into some hot water because of this.

86. Political representation of minorities should be guaranteed in State institutions. The Government should accede to the request of the Ainu community to have a quota in the Diet for Ainu representatives. The same could be envisaged for the people of Okinawa.

I’ve dealt with the Ainu issue, but Okinawa already has representitives in the national parliament! Or does this mean that the Okinawan candidates must be native Okinawans?

95. The Government should also adopt measures to combat prejudices against foreigners through culture, in particular through promoting the knowledge of depth of the culture of the other. This could be most effectively achieved by promoting a vast programme of intercultural and interreligious dialogue, the organization of foreign cultural festivals and by creating dynamic cultural centres, of African, Arab, European and other countries, and developing Japanese cultural centres, in particular in the countries of the new migrants’ population, where prejudices are combated by knowing, understanding and appreciating the culture and history of others.

Hurrah! White elephants and foreign junkets galore! I can see this one being adopted tomorrow…