TOKYO, July 18, 2019—What Trump is doing to immigrants is likely to hit Japan a few decades later as foreigner populations soar while Japan’s populations decrease: Regulate foreigners coming to Japan, segregate foreigners’ children in schools, deny access to the country’s National Health Insurance and public pensions. Preempting it would be difficult and painful unless bold actions are taken now.
I was in a hurry and many eating establishments were overfilled with lunchtime crowds, so I entered a Matsuya beef bowl stand that looking from the street had some empty stools. I ordered a small beef bowl so that I can fill up my stomach before heading to the next destination. The waiter put a glass of water in front of me, took my order without uttering a welcome or anything. He was not a Japanese and looked like a Southeast Asian. I emptied the glass and tried to pour more water myself from a jug sitting on the counter. The lid was loose and came off the jug, spilling water and ice cubes, almost but not quite to a young woman sitting immediately on my right and eating what she had to order. I cleaned the table with a towel the waiter brought and noticed the lady next to me was not a Japanese either, probably a Southeast Asian. My order served, I started eating my quick lunch, when three people came in to the place, two men and a woman, all young and caucasian. They asked for a beef bowl takeout to a lady working in the back kitchen. She also looked like a Southeast Asian. The three restaurant staffers seemed to be all non-Japanese. I looked about the whole counter and realized that more than half of the customers were non-Japanese, some looking like travelers with backpacks by their side and others probably local residents.
The realization that more foreign nationals are in Japan, and increasingly as manual workers, touched me as an undeniable new reality recently. A few days earlier, I had to go to an ophthalmologist and after dripping my consultation card at the clinic, I excused myself for a quick bite of lunch at a fast food joint, well, again. I entered the place and was welcomed with a crisp address of ‘Irasshai-mase!’ – by a caucasian woman attendant. She was working briskly next to one who looked like a young Japanese woman who didn’t seem to like her work and wore frowned eyebrows, contrast to the foreign worker who beamed a smile at me when she took my order.
Until twenty years ago, foreign populations meant second and third-generation Japanese-Brazilians sweating at auto and electronics manufacturer assembly lines, and before then, Korean Japanese who had emigrated to Japan to avoid persecutions centuries ago and those that came during the second world war, Chinese who had arrived even before the Koreans, and specks of ‘gaijin’ most of them Americans that stayed on in Japan after the war.
Now, foreigners are all over the spectrum of Japanese society and regions as office workers, executives, teachers, and more recently in workplaces requiring physical input. Plus millions of tourists.
More foreign travelers, more residents, plunging Japanese population. A combination of globally developing and fortuitous factors are drawing foreign travelers to Japan – Accommodation sharing services like airbnb, low-cost carrier air flights, popularity of Japanese food, and then the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games, among many. Correspondingly, in 2018, a total of 31.1 million foreign tourists visited Japan, an 8.7 percent year-on-year increase and almost four times over 2008 when the number was 8.35 million, according to the Japanese government’s Japan National Tourist Organization data. The government wants the number to surpass 40 million in 2020 with the Tokyo Olympics as a key boon.
In the meantime, Japan’s population is shrinking at the fastest pace in the world. Cabinet Office demographics forecast in 2012 said the population, which is now at 127 million, would decrease to less than 100 million by 2048 and shrink to as few as 867 million in 2060. The deceleration velocity is picking up speed more recently with the same Cabinet Office forecast predicting the population in 2110 to be 42.86 million. And at 28 percent, the ratio of old-age people against the total population of 127 million is at a record high. The figure would climb to 37.7 percent in 2050, the Cabinet Office forecast in the 2017 white paper on aging.
In an inverted trend, the foreign ‘resident population’ is increasing solidly, mirroring the effect of Japanese government’s policy to admit more foreign labor to make up for the slack resulting from the Japanese population shrinkage and aging. The foreign resident population as of Jan.1, 2019 was 2.667 million, an all-time high and up 6.79 percent year-on-year and representing 2.09 percent of Japan’s total population of 127.443 million, according to the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications’ recent data. In addition, there are about 74,000 undocumented aliens living in Japan as of Jan. 1, 2019, according to the Ministry of Justice statistics. So the aggregate ‘official’ foreign resident population on that day stood at 2.674 million.
But the realistic foreign resident population should be much larger. A senior Japanese Foreign Ministry official had told me a few years ago that a few percent of foreign tourists stay on in Japan, hired by businesses managed by formally vetted foreign business owners in Japan and Japanese employers that need foreign labor, such as yakuza gangsters and construction firms. Based on a conservative estimate that the stay-on ratio is 1 percent, approximately 311,000 foreign travelers have become residents, bringing the total to about 3 million.
Abe’s pro-foreign labor policy. This spring, prime minister Abe launched a pro-foreign labor policy to enable restaurants and other businesses needing manual labor to hire foreign workers. During the first few years starting 2019, the number to be admitted is 45,000 a year, and it would be increased progressively later. Ultimately, the policy would admit foreign nationals to work and live in Japan exactly like Japanese to be naturalized.
It sounds like a beautiful idea but the reality is different. Cities like the ancient capital of Kyoto and Ota, Gunma, where automaker Subaru Corp. is headquartered, are lukewarm to accepting more foreign tourists and residents. Kyoto Shimbun newspaper frequently reports about foreign tourists’ bad manners and inconveniences caused by them such as touching kimono of Maiko, graffiti, high costs of language education for foreigners’ children.
The story doesn’t end there, however. Hospitals and clinics have been reported to have missed receiving payments from foreign tourists after treatment. A March 2019 Ministry of Health Labor and Welfare survey showed that 18.9 percent of hospitals that took part in the survey replied that foreign visitors failed to pay medical bills that averaged $4,100. The survey was taken in October 2018 alone. Because of language barriers, many hospitals hire interpreters at their own cost but do not charge the fees, according to a ministry official July 18. Though the foreigners’ no-pay to date has been a minor incident as a whole for Japan’s health insurance system, it would mean a cost burden if the trend continues, particularly toward the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games, he said. Whether it is still being practiced is not clear but a few years ago when Japan was generous enough to have non-residents register for the National Health Insurance program, foreign travelers would exploit the opportunity and abuse the insurance, which pays 2/3rdof the medical cost from the policy.
Something similar could happen to the national pension program. The Abe government revised the policy to pay public pensions to people who did not pay premiums for 25 years. The new rule qualifies people to receive payments if they paid premiums for a minimum of 10 years. Long-term foreign residents have begun applying for receiving pensions, and that is putting extra burdens on the policy that’s already operating on thin ice resulting from population aging.
Toshio Aritake