TOKYO, Aug. 13, 2023– What’s remarkable about Japanese politicians and bureaucrats is their utter ineptitude at handling important policies, and instead at showing shrewd skills at escaping them. Their handling (or not handling at all) of one racial case is a classic example. It’s an incident that has been smoldering for years and now is coming to the head as a litmus test for policymakers as Japan is poised to becomes a multiracial country.
On July 4, 2023, dozens of foreign residents, most of them believed to be Kurds from Turkey, battled against Japan’s riot police over a fracas between them and Japanese residents in Kawaguchi, north of Tokyo, the first such open standoff between foreigners and the Japanese since the end of World War II. The clash seemed to be about the foreigners’ manners that local Japanese saw as unacceptable.
By some accounts, the tussle was the most serious in Japan since 1968, when Japanese students clashed against riot police. Yet, Japanese media treatment was muted to say the least. Major television stations and newspapers did not report about the Kawaguchi clash. The media presumably sided with the government’s attitude of not waking up a sleeping child (racial discrimination argument).
The Kawaguchi tussle seems to have been triggered over a Turkish national man who was assaulted by a multiple number of Turkish men in the city. The man appeared to have been rushed into a nearby hospital, and his relatives and friends and foes attempted to force into the hospital, according to Japanese news reports. The hospital called police and at the same time refused to admit all emergency admittance for more than 5 hours. Two men were arrested for battery to police officers and 4 others were arrested for murder charges. During the 5 hours when emergency admittance was suspended, the hospital received as many as 21 emergency requests.
The fracas was a tip of an iceberg of growing confrontation between Japanese and foreign residents of Kawaguchi over the past decade. The Japanese are arguing that the Kurds are violating community rules and threatening their peaceful living, such as driving large trucks in residential streets at high speed and causing accidents. Some Kurds claim that they are singled out as bad guys in racial discrimination. To complicate the situation, in October 2015, rival Turks and Kurds living in Kawaguchi battled in front of the Turkish embassy in Tokyo over early voting of the Nov. 1, 2015 Turkish parliamentary election, according to Japanese reports. The clash needed Japanese police intervention.
A majority of city assembly members had submitted in June 2023 a report to the city council and the national Diet, the prefecture and police to take action, according to a copy of the report. To date, however, except the July 4 riot police mobilization, lawmakers, the city assembly, the city hall (bureaucracy) and other public entities are lending deaf ears to the plea, most likely with the thinking that racial problems similar to those in the U.S. and other foreign counterparts are too complicated for them to handle.
Japan and Turkey have a mutual visas waiver agreement, and probably for that arrangement, many Kurds began arriving in Japan to live in Kawaguchi, where as many as 1,200 Turkish nationals live, many believed to be Kurds. Their visas are believed to be renewed, instead of recognizing them as refugees. Many other Kurds also are said to overstay their visas. Kawaguchi’s population is 600,000, of which 39,000, or 6.5 percent are foreign nationals making the city the largest foreign population municipality in Japan.
Though different in context, during the World War II period, Japan took many discriminating actions against Koreans and Chinese. The Japanese, considering them as a superior race, forced them to manual labor and little else, and even during the post-war period, they had been mistreated.
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