When I lived in the Japanese countryside 10 years ago, I rarely came across other non-Japanese residents. But when I visited last month, I was struck by how much had changed. Some of the young people staffing reception desks and video game arcades wore badges with non-Japanese names.
At one pub-restaurant in Kanazawa, a mid-sized city north of Tokyo, I saw a young Caucasian assistant behind the counter assisting the sushi chef. At another restaurant, we were served by a non-Japanese waiter from an Asian nation — and ended up communicating in English.
Add in other factors including never-before-seen levels of foreign tourism, plus massive preparations for the Tokyo Summer Olympics, and the result is a nation that desperately needs more workers to fill jobs. Japan has been aware of a looming demographic crunch for decades, but because successive governments have been reluctant to take major steps, the problem has become more urgent. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe wants to bring in more foreign, low-wage workers.
But his proposal to accept hundreds of thousands of people to fill blue-collar jobs by is highly controversial in a nation that has traditionally shunned immigration. The new bill comes at a time of historic change in Japan. And how everything shakes out could shape the country for generations.
Japan's population is the fastest-ageing in the world, leaving behind huge swaths of jobs in the country that need filling Credit: Alamy Stock Photo. Originally from Nepal, Shrestha is one of the 1. The low figure is because immigration has traditionally been unpopular in Japan.
An island nation, it was once fiercely isolationist. Up until the mids, those entering or leaving the country could be punished by death. Now, however, modern Japan views itself as homogenous, with a strong cultural identity. Historically, domestic anxieties toward immigration stem from perceived job losses, cultural disruption and fears of spiking crime rates in what is a famously low-crime nation.
A scene from Tokyo's parliament on 7 December , when it passed an historic bill to bring in more foreign, blue-collar workers than ever Credit: Getty Images. Japan took in just The system is unforgiving. Many asylum seekers are held in detention centers while their cases are being processed, particularly if they are believed to have used fraudulent documents to escape to Japan.
Applicants can legally work while they wait for their paperwork to be reviewed, but not for the first eight months after their arrival. The labor force is depleted, and businesses are desperate for new workers to jump-start a stalled economy. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe announced last year that about , unskilled laborers will be granted guest visas over the next five years to backfill small and medium-size enterprises in industries such as agriculture, nursing, and construction.
The migrants cannot bring relatives with them, and are dissuaded from settling down, but this nevertheless marks a significant shift. I found a hint of what this influx of foreign workers might mean in Odaka, a town devastated when the nearby Fukushima nuclear-power plant melted down after the earthquake and tsunami.
Huge numbers of people have left—just two students remain on the local high-school team that practices kendo, a traditional Japanese martial art. In a country with little experience with large-scale immigration, this dynamic has led to concerns.
Her concerns, and those of others here, are amplified by television images of people moving, seemingly out of control, across borders in Europe and the southern United States. More people are migrating around the globe than at any other time in human history, crossing oceans and borders to get to countries such as Japan. And so efforts are being made to acclimate the newcomers. Mayor Nobuo Okunoki has heard the complaints about the Kurds throwing out their trash on the wrong days and hanging out with their countrymen in large, loud groups.
But Okunoki said they eventually adapt to the Japanese way of life. Efforts are also being made to help the Japanese adapt to the foreigners. Above the library in Kawaguchi, the Multicultural Coexistence Subsection offers brochures that translate phrases from Japanese into various languages, including Kurdish.
That caring heart is not, however, government policy. A smaller cause of the steady decrease has been that foreigners are moving out of Tokyo to other parts of Japan.
This movement is not unique to the resident foreigner population. We can also see the same pattern in the overall Japanese population. In this article, however, we focus just on analyzing where resident foreigners are moving in Japan, specifically on what prefectures they are moving to and from. It does not include people moving within a prefecture or city for example, people moving from one ward to another in Tokyo.
The numbers represent the net population gain or loss by month for January to September Source: Japan Ministry of Internal Affairs. And here is the table, if we rank the prefectures by net population gain due to movement between prefectures:. Saitama, Kanagawa and Gunma, the top three prefectures in terms of net foreigner population gain by inbound migration from other prefectures never experienced a net loss in any month this year.
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