Color blinded: a user's guide to racism in Japan

Japan, Inc., April, 2004 by Tony McNicol

RACIAL profiling is old news in Japan, which makes us wonder: how will a country that so desperately needs immigrant labor adapt to a sudden influx of foreign faces?

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I TEND TO AVOID cycling past the police-box around the corner from my apartment these days. Not that I've broken any laws recently, but at about the same time I started researching this article about racial discrimination, I was flagged down by a policeman outside my local koban. He asked me a few perfunctory questions and I politely reminded him that this was the second time I'd been stopped at exactly the same place.

He let me go, sheepishly muttering something about preventing crime. But why, I wondered, should the police be so interested in me or my battered shopping bicycle?

I doubt I'm the only foreign resident to wonder whether their passport or the color of their skin now automatically marks them out as a potential miscreant. Tokyo Governor Shintaro Ishihara has been quick to pin the blame on foreigners, particularly illegal immigrants and foreign students. In a speech last year, he argued that foreign criminals were taking advantage of "our low level of caution and lenient penalties" to target Japan: "a defenseless nation with lucrative opportunities." And this past December, Ishihara's warning grew more specific. "While foreigners are not the only factor behind the deterioration in Tokyo's security," he told the Japan Times, "they have introduced new kinds of crimes to Japan."

For people like Ishihara, immigration and internationalization seem to equal more crime. Last year's police white paper kicks off with a 30-page section referring to the "foreign nationals who have entered our country [and] are forming criminal gangs here, possibly linking up with domestic organized crime groups and crime syndicates based abroad."

The numbers

Crime has been increasing in Japan for seven years in the wake of the economic downturn. According to the National Police Agency's white paper in 2003, more than 2,850,000 crimes were committed in the preceding year, the highest number since the Pacific War. Arrest rates have slumped from 60 percent in the 80s to barely 20 percent now.

Crime committed by foreigners may be increasing--but so is the overall number of foreigners. 27,258 arrests of foreigners (not including visa violations, which only foreigners can commit) were recorded in 2003. That's only about 4 percent of the total number of arrests in Japan. Critics of government policy and media coverage say that foreigner-related crime figures are rarely compared with Japanese crime figures, and that they mislead the public by stigmatizing non-Japanese.

The police certainly aren't hesitant to ask for money for various schemes to combat foreigner crime. The National Research Institute of Police Science is trying to develop a DNA test to identify the race of criminal suspects who leave DNA at crime scenes. According to a summary on the NRIPS website, the purpose of the ongoing four-year study is to deal with "the increasing number of brutal crimes committed by foreigners, which is accompanying economic and social internationalization in our country."

Foreign students living in Tokyo recently received fliers from a Kyoto-based work recruitment company looking for non-Japanese, Chinese or Korean volunteers to go to an unnamed laboratory in Roppongi to have their palms scanned for "security research development."

"I was suspicious because they didn't include any information about what the data would be used for," says Australian student Rocco Weglarz. "Maybe the palm readers on the streets here are paying for the research," he jokes. When contacted by J@pan Inc, the recruitment company refused to disclose the name of the security company or the purpose of its research.

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Immigration?

In fact, despite anxiety about internationalization and an invasion of foreign gangsters, economic necessity means that many foreign workers have already got their feet in Japan's doors. Some economists predict that Japan will have to invite millions of foreign workers to counter its declining birth rate (see J@pan Inc, October 2003). A recent study by the World Economic Forum and Watson Wyatt Worldwide estimated that Japan would have to increase current immigration rates by 11 times to make up for its low fertility. If present trends continue, Japan's share of total global output could be halved by 2050.

Advocates of immigration worry that an atmosphere of prejudice and suspicion could discourage workers from coming to Japan. Likewise, Ishihara's pledge to "monitor international students in their study and part-time work activities" is unlikely to help plans to increase the number of foreign students--even as educated Japanese-speaking immigrants are precisely the kind of people the economy will need.

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One Tokyo group helping students from Korea, China and elsewhere says that prejudice against foreign students in Japan was rife well before recent scaremongering. Tokyo Alien Eyes, a not-for-profit organization (NPO), surveyed 57 real estate agencies in the city's Kunitachi district and found that 85 percent of them refused to rent to foreign students. The organization's founder Fumio Takano says that students face similar problems when looking for work.